In this episode of The War Room, host Stephen K. Bannon sits down with author Grayson Quay to discuss his new book, The Transhumanist Temptation: How Technology and Ideology are reshaping humanity and how to resist it.
00:08:38.000So then, you know, I was interested in kind of the post liberal critique of our political system that asks, you know, do we have we gotten to a point where we don't acknowledge any higher good for humanity other than what each individual chooses for themselves?
00:08:52.000And could it be possible to orient a politics around some shared ideal of human flourishing that's deeper than that?
00:08:59.000I got really interested in kind of new right economics and the economic nationalist side.
00:09:03.000Like, can we build an economy that's not just line go up, but that serves some again, some ideal of human flourishing that isn't just maximum consumption and maximum choice.
00:09:13.000And then on the religious side, as you mentioned, I got really interested in these questions of re-enchantment and spiritual warfare, the kind of stuff that Jonathan Pajot was doing.
00:09:22.000And then suddenly I had kind of an epiphany where I realized the thread connecting all of this was transhumanism.
00:09:29.000And from that insight kind of came this book.
00:09:32.000Tell me this, from a family man perspective, what is your ideal for human flourishing?
00:09:41.000Well, I think there are certain human goods that you can deduce from human nature.
00:09:47.000You know, part of this is marriage and family, you know, freedom to not freedom to define yourself in kind of this existentialist way, but freedom to work towards your flourishing, the pursuit of happiness, which, you know, if you read the founders, they don't mean, you know, the freedom to, you know, live as a woman or to, you know, do whatever you want in this way.
00:10:11.000They really mean eudaimonia when they say happiness, like they all have this robust understanding of natural law or almost all do.
00:10:18.000Alexander Hamilton gets into it a lot in his essay, Farmer Refuted, which I'd highly recommend to everyone.
00:10:23.000He debunks this idea that the founders were just these, you know, were uniformly just these enlightenment rationalists who were just totally deracinated and just wanted anything like the current regime that we have.
00:10:36.000But yeah, that's that's what I would say. Yeah. And I think that, you know, there's one of the thinkers I quote in the book is John Finnis, who's this kind of modern natural law philosopher, and he goes through and identifies these human goods.
00:10:50.000But unfortunately, we've gotten to the point where I think the only human goods we recognize are individual autonomy and GDP growth.
00:10:56.460Yeah, I feel that. What are some of these human goods? And I'm not familiar with John Finnis.
00:11:02.840Yeah. So he mentions aesthetic appreciation, marriage and family.
00:11:10.020I'd have to pull up the thing to get the full list. I think he has about nine of them.
00:11:14.580You know, there's kind of play and leisure. You know, there's the liberty to be uninhibited in the pursuit of your flourishing as a human being.
00:11:23.480These are all things that you can kind of deduce just from what we know ourselves to be as humans.
00:11:29.220This isn't something like, you know, oh, we want to impose religion on people like the whole point of natural law theory is that these are truths that can be known through unaided human reason, which are then, you know, confirmed by revelation because they're true of the world God created.
00:11:43.380It's not that revelation is this extrinsic thing imposing obligations on you that are completely unrooted in the kind of creature that you are.
00:11:51.840That would be sort of a cruel cosmic joke if God were to have done something like that, I think.
00:11:56.240And I mean, you know, there's a natural law tradition that is present in Christianity.
00:11:59.720Yes. But, you know, that you can find in Aristotle, who obviously was not a Christian.
00:12:05.220Yeah, Aquinas picks it up. But, you know, there's natural law traditions within Islam and Judaism as well that I haven't read as much into, but I know they exist.
00:12:13.140And there's, you know, some modern kind of secular natural law thinkers as well.
00:12:16.860Yeah, I think there is a good argument that the book of nature has a lot to tell us about what it means to be human and perhaps even the telos of the human species, although opinions differ on that.
00:12:31.780When you look at the fossil record, for instance, and consider the human being from the evolutionary perspective, if one reads the book of nature in that fashion, I think that's one of the justifications for this transhumanist point of view.
00:12:47.960You see radical biological alteration from the australopithecines through the hominids and then a pretty radical shift beginning with everything from campfires and spears, the reduction in dentition and the gut.
00:13:07.400And so I think transhumanism or many, if not most, not all transhumanists.
00:13:12.460Sorry, can I jump in on the evolution?
00:13:13.700Yeah, so I think, yeah, there's a reason that transhumanism is often framed in kind of evolutionary terms.
00:13:19.380Julian Huxley, who coins the term in the modern sense in which it's used in the 1950s, he's the brother of Aldous Huxley, interestingly, who wrote Brave New World.
00:13:27.160But Julian Huxley said his definition of transhumanism is that man has been appointed managing director of man's own evolution by virtue of our scientific knowledge that we now have.
00:13:37.340We didn't ask for the job, but now we have it and we have to direct human evolution using these tools that we have.
00:13:42.400G.K. Chesterton has an interesting response, I think, to what you brought up with, you know, the fact that we can look at the fossil record and see a track of human evolution.
00:13:51.140Chesterton says that, you know, as a Catholic, him writing, he says, I don't object to the theory of evolution.
00:13:58.240I think it's totally possible that God could have used the evolutionary process to produce the kind of beings he wanted to create.
00:14:04.700Because I don't kind of as a means to that final end that he had in mind, which was to create humanity as the kind of beings that we are.
00:14:11.460If you look at it that way, it doesn't pose any threat to some idea of natural law.
00:14:15.600You can still get an ought out of the is of the kind of beings that we are.
00:14:19.000Chesterton's fear was if you adopt kind of this Darwinist or evolutionary view as a philosophy and you just say, well, everything is flux.
00:14:27.120It's, you know, there's no definition of human nature because it's something that's always changing.
00:14:32.960And the fact that it's moving more slowly than we can, you know, observe doesn't mean anything because that's just a function of how we perceive the world.
00:14:41.400Like if you sped time up enough, you could watch humans change the way that you could, you know, I could sit on my patio and watch a flower bud open.
00:14:48.240Right. So this is what Chesterton, the argument that Chesterton makes is that if you have some view of evolution as a teleological process that produced humanity, you're sort of still on safe ground.
00:15:00.600But once you adopt this view of everything as universal flux, then any idea of human nature just becomes observational or like a purely arbitrarily arbitrary linguistic label.
00:15:10.780And then you've fully jumped into the transhumanist realm.
00:15:15.440So it's it raises a lot of interesting and thorny questions.
00:15:19.760Julian Huxley's close friend, Teilhard Deschardins, I didn't know they were friends.
00:15:26.200That's interesting. Yeah, he actually chances are Julian Huxley got the term from him.
00:15:31.200Deschardins had written about the progress of humanity and the scope of technological development and kind of coined the term.
00:15:41.120And actually, there was a German scientist, geochemist, I can never remember his name, Vladimir Verdansky, I believe, something to that effect, who had coined it before.
00:15:50.540So it seems to be like the chain of custody of transhumanism, as you point out, from Dante to Verdansky.
00:15:58.140Sorry, Vladimir, if I'm mispronouncing or miss saying your name, to Teilhard Deschardins and then Julian Huxley.
00:16:05.860And I've always found it interesting with Huxley.
00:16:08.740You know, he is taking a very scientific perspective on this.
00:16:12.820He's basically an atheist, despite all of his his nods to religion as a positive cultural force.
00:16:19.160And he's and Huxley is arguing mainly from a cultural standpoint, that human beings can evolve through scientific knowledge of the species.
00:16:29.520And it doesn't really touch on technology, although obviously that grows out of it.
00:16:34.100I think the way he stated it was that the transhuman man will be as different from our form as we are from Peking man or, you know, the Homo erectus.
00:16:45.300Yeah, I think Julian Huxley kind of suffered from a failure of imagination.
00:16:49.040You know, you read his essay and he talks about transhumanism and then it's like, oh, what are we going to do with transhumanism?
00:16:53.120And it's like, we're going to have better education and cleaner cities.
00:16:56.340And it's like, OK, you know, kind of, you know, I describe it as cultural eugenics.
00:17:01.140Yeah, he believed in real eugenics, too, of course, president of the British Eugenics Society.
00:17:06.780Yeah, they go hand in hand that you should be sterilized involuntarily if you were out of work for too long.
00:17:11.800I don't think he was so harsh, but yeah, his compatriots definitely were.
00:17:16.440You know, the perspective of Deschardins, right, Teilhard's idea of the noosphere, you know, that there is still that teleological element for him and a deeply Christian element, right?
00:17:28.800I mean, obviously he was condemned for heresy, although I don't think he was excommunicated.
00:17:33.800But he was silenced by the Catholic Church because of this heterodox viewpoint that merges human evolution from a kind of creative, you know, God-willed perspective with Christian theology.
00:17:52.020Well, that's what I'd say in response to there is like man's ultimate telos isn't the kind of beings you and I are today.
00:17:56.900You know, there's a parallel to you mentioned like Peking man to humanity is to human is transhuman man, the Julian Huxley thing.
00:18:04.100There's a really close parallel, actually, to that statement in St. Paul, where he I think it's in First Corinthians.
00:18:08.720He says, you know, the way that you plant a seed and then it grows into a plant.
00:18:13.100And from looking at the seed, you could never guess what the plant would be, what the plant would look like full grown.
00:18:18.320He says like the, you know, the adult human being you are today is to, you know, that seed as, you know, the glorified body is to that plant, right?
00:18:27.980So the end of the ultimate telos of humanity, you know, is not the creatures we are today.
00:18:34.800It really is this, you know, deified, glorified state that's promised to us in the resurrection of the dead to be partakers of the divine nature, to experience theosis, right?
00:18:44.800Deification is the Greek term, to be sons of God equal to the angels, as Christ said in one of the Gospels.
00:18:51.880So that's really the ultimate telos of humanity.
00:18:55.720The thing is, we're not called to bootstrap ourselves into that state through, you know, technological meanings.
00:19:02.960And in fact, the fact that, you know, the eternal logos becomes incarnate as a human actually makes our human nature, you know, limited and flawed as it is in the world that we're living in today.
00:19:17.920That becomes the vehicle for our salvation.
00:19:20.580The human nature that we share with Christ enables us to eventually come and reign with him in glory forever.
00:19:26.780You know, God became man that man might become God.
00:19:29.040And so it's not, you don't deify yourself, you don't claim this glorification or this, you know, transhuman state, if I could put it that way, by achieving it on your own, apart from your creator.
00:19:44.580You achieve it actually by living and actually suffering as a human.
00:19:49.820And that's what we can see in the, you know, the saints and the martyrs and everything.
00:19:53.120I guess that's why it becomes so thorny because the, again, I don't want to linger too much longer on Teilhard's vision of the noosphere and the omega point and all this, but he is accounting for all of that, right?
00:20:07.040It's just simply a techno-positive sort of techno-optimist Christian point of view.
00:20:14.360And I think that a lot of, as you point out in the book, and correctly so, a lot of the transhumanist goals have seeped into what we would call conservatism or Christianity and other religious traditions too.
00:20:27.020So the question then becomes, and I'll pose this to you, in Teilhard de Chardin's view, technology inherently, in the same way the seed grows into an adult human, the species is growing and developing.
00:20:45.020There's an ontogeny that is evident in the civilizational development of man into the noosphere from the campfire to the streets to the telegraph to the internet.
00:20:55.100And it would appear that there is a kind of pre-programmed, a front-loaded purpose to the technological project.
00:21:05.020Now, I'm very much on the Luddite end of the spectrum, although very much a failed Luddite.
00:21:18.000Yeah, so one thing that I think is really interesting is you may have this sense in which God deems that we are kind of ready for a certain technology to come to us and that we, you know, use it wisely in order to kind of advance our human flourishing and to better, you know, serve him and glorify him and advance the common good.
00:21:38.540But you have to admit that there is also a parallel project by which demonic forces are trying to give us technologies that we are not ready for so that we can destroy ourselves with them.
00:21:48.840I mean, this is the story of the Nephilim that you get in Genesis 6 and following, and then that's expanded upon in the Book of Enoch.
00:21:55.480Yeah, yeah, I love doing the Enoch stuff.
00:21:58.060But, you know, these Nephilim are demon-human hybrids that are described in Genesis 6, you know, the sons of God mating with the daughters of men.
00:22:04.640And, you know, interesting parallels to today.
00:22:08.620We have a disembodied superintelligence that you're going to merge yourself with to create these superhuman beings and that, you know, bootstrapping of intelligence and power is then going to produce technologies that you can use to conquer nature and enslave your fellow man.
00:22:24.700You know, the Nephilim are the original transhumans here in this way.
00:22:42.240You know, he actually published a special edition of the Book of Enoch, and he sees it in quite literal physical terms, the Nephilim and the mating with the daughters of men.
00:22:54.240I take a more, let's say, allegorical perspective on it, but isn't it a genocidal racist story?
00:23:14.220I mean, you know, demons aren't a race of humans.
00:23:17.640They certainly seem to be described that way.
00:23:19.960They have the equipment to mate with the daughters of men.
00:23:23.320Well, what appears to be going on there, based on the archaeological record we've been able to find in Deuteronomy, there's a reference to the bed of King Og of Bashan, which we've actually found.
00:23:32.420It's, you know, something like 11 feet long, which interestingly, you know, any portrayals of these kind of godlike beings that we have from, you know, the artistic record from around the world, they're all about 11 or 12 feet tall, interestingly.
00:23:44.200Um, uh, but yeah, I think that, uh, what's going on with the, the bed of King Og of Bashan is it's a, it's a ritual bed, you know, where the, there would be a, some kind of religious temple ritual in which a demonic spirit or a god from their perspective would be invited to possess one of the sexual partners in the coupling.
00:24:05.000Mm, and that's with the Babylonians too.
00:24:07.300Yeah, this is what the Babylonians are doing, yeah, and that that's producing that, uh, that offspring.
00:24:11.700So I think that, you know, you have to see, you know, maybe you can see, you know, like you were saying with, uh, you could see a way in which God is giving us technology and to facilitate our development towards some end, but you also have to see a parallel one in which demonic forces are offering us technologies in order to destroy ourselves and in which God occasionally, you know, at the flood and at the Tower of Babel intervenes to set that back and put time back on the clock for us to prevent us from destroying ourselves.
00:24:38.100Uh, will he do that again? I am not sure. I think it's entirely possible that, you know, following the incarnation of Christ, it's sort of only going in one direction and we're, we're heading toward some kind of end point here.
00:24:50.100You mentioned like when it's, I'll tell you what, we have to go to a commercial break and, uh, when we come back, I think, uh, we'll, we'll hit these mythological elements, but maybe some of the more practical problems of, of transhumanism.
00:25:02.100That's exactly where I was going to segue. So looking forward to it.
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00:31:34.840All right, War Room Posse, we are back.
00:31:38.700And I'm here with Grayson Quay, author of The Transhumanist Temptation, a fantastic book from Crisis Publications.
00:31:47.820And Grayson, I want to talk a little bit about the practical difficulties that transhumanism and techno-optimism pose for Christians.
00:32:00.020Something that we cover a lot is the eugenic underpinnings of transhumanism and the current projects to, for instance, select embryos pre-implantation.
00:32:12.360Basically, you produce 10, 15, maybe 20 embryos and then select the supreme one and hook the rest into the cherub ward.
00:32:22.080Yeah, yeah. I'm against that just for practical purposes.
00:32:24.560I wouldn't have wanted my parents to be like, oh, this one's going to go bald in his 20s.
00:32:30.020Yeah, you know, if it had been my mom's choice, I probably would have been taller, smarter, and quieter.
00:32:37.020But, you know, she chose wisely, I think.
00:32:40.400Also, too, there are other real barriers, you know, that I think a lot of Christians see these as sacred boundaries you do not cross.
00:32:48.700You look at Elon Musk's project with Neuralink.
00:32:51.740Peter Thiel has kind of a parallel project with BlackRock Neurotech.
00:32:56.720And you have Synchron invested in by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
00:33:01.420And now Sam Altman, perhaps just to spite Musk, is co-founding the merge brain-computer interfaces to link you to what they believe to be the kind of god in seed form, the digital god that will soon grow into artificial general and then artificial superintelligence.
00:33:19.560So looking at all these different things, even, hey, just even the smartphone, right?
00:33:29.220And why should Christians reject this?
00:33:31.840If this can make them healthier, if this can make them smarter, if this can give their children a leg up in a very economically competitive world, why should Christians reject it?
00:33:42.140Yeah, so one thing I knew going into writing this book was no matter what I say, I'm going to be accused of being alighted of just hating Christianity or just hating technology, rather, of hating technology, right?
00:33:53.940One of the responses I got from a transhumanist type was like, oh, if you'd been around, you know, 200,000 years ago, you would have been saying, no, we can't sharpen sticks.
00:34:01.140We got to just throw rocks, you know, sharpen sticks are an abomination, right?
00:34:05.560But I think that the reason the transhumanists and the tech optimist types tend to react this way when you question technology is because they don't have any philosophical framework for asking and answering the question of when is it too far and how should we apply technology?
00:34:18.940And I think that natural law provides that framework.
00:34:23.000So just to give a few quick examples, people will say like, oh, you're already a transhumanist.
00:34:26.900You wear contact lenses and, you know, maybe you get a knee replacement or have an artificial pacemaker put in your heart to regulate your heartbeat.
00:34:33.780To me, none of these are transhumanist technologies.
00:34:43.100If my eyes don't see well, it's a perfectly legitimate application of technology to create a device, a pair of eyeglasses or a pair of contact lenses that I can use to supply that deficiency.
00:34:54.880You know, we know what a good eye does and we can make my eye do that, you know, in the same way like a prosthesis.
00:35:03.320If I lose my hand, the prosthesis that they give me will try to replicate the form and function of the appendage that I've lost.
00:35:10.720Now, if you want to replace my hand with a laser gun, now we're in transhumanist territory.
00:35:15.040If you lost your hand, would you replace it with a laser gun?
00:35:19.380It sounds pretty cool, but no, I don't think so.
00:35:22.940Yeah, well, a hook's kind of like an attempt at an approximation, right?
00:35:26.360We've gotten a little better at it now, though.
00:35:29.600And I think that this is really sad because I want to be a tech optimist.
00:35:32.940I would love to just say full steam ahead on this stuff because there's so many technologies that can help us flourish better as humans, as the kind of beings that we've been created to be.
00:35:41.860But unfortunately, we just don't have the ability to draw the line.
00:35:44.700One example I go into in my book is artificial wombs.
00:35:48.720So there's actually a wonderful application of artificial wombs, potential application of artificial wombs.
00:35:54.440We don't have the technology yet that we can use for humans.
00:35:56.600They've tried to grow, you know, a lamb embryo in a bag.
00:35:59.980Yeah, but, you know, assuming we had, you know, this technology that we could use on humans right now, if a woman goes into labor before her unborn child is viable, that child will die.
00:36:11.400Or if it's a situation where, you know, the mother's life is being threatened by her pregnancy, you know, even from kind of a Catholic bioethical standpoint, they'll say, OK, you can induce labor, even though that's going to be a death sentence for the child, because, you know, it's a doctrine of double effect.
00:36:26.900You're trying to save the mother's life, treating the child as a second patient.
00:36:29.560But unfortunately, there's no chance of saving it.
00:36:31.960If you had an artificial womb, you could then quickly transfer that child to the bio bag or the gestation pod or whatever form it takes and allow it to continue developing to the point of viability.
00:36:44.380The mother and the child both get to survive.
00:36:46.580Interestingly, there were, you know, when this was first tested, when the bio bag was first kind of tested, there were feminists who came out and said, we don't want this technology because it undermines the argument for abortion.
00:36:56.740Yeah, because now you can end your pregnancy without killing your baby and you're still stuck with a baby and they don't want that.
00:37:01.740My friend Jennifer Billick, she wrote the book Trans, Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman.
00:37:09.100And she argues forcefully that the push towards IVF and then artificial wounds is a quite literal replacement of the of the woman, the essential biological woman or an attempt to do so.
00:37:22.280Yeah. Well, they want this to become the new norm.
00:37:23.900You see this with North Siddiqui and the the orchid embryo screening thing where she says, like, sex should just be for fun.
00:37:29.280Embryo screening should be for babies.
00:37:30.620Like, no, no children should be conceived through sex anymore.
00:37:33.140That's, in fact, reckless on that note.
00:37:35.740I mean, you've got like Sam Altman has invested in conception, which does the same.
00:37:41.140Steve Sue, if I'm pronouncing his Chinese name properly.
00:37:44.280And then Orchid Health and a number of other operations.
00:37:48.340You know, they're doing everything possible to resuscitate the eugenic project with the preimplantation genetic screening.
00:37:57.160And in the case of, say, Tay-Sachs or Down syndrome or any other genetic disorder, even a real horrific predisposition towards cancer, you can see from a practical level how that would save the future child from having any of these genetic disorders.
00:38:17.740And, of course, then it would also take it out of the gene pool.
00:38:20.200Well, screening doesn't save the child from having that disorder.
00:38:22.500It just kills the children that have that disorder.
00:38:26.360But one way or the other, I can see from a practical standpoint, especially if you don't believe in divine intervention and the physical processes, why one would want to do that.
00:38:36.080But from your perspective, and especially from the Catholic perspective, you said it right there.
00:38:42.160I mean, you literally are creating anywhere from 5 to 15 to 20 embryos that you then shuffle off to the cherub ward.
00:38:52.940Yeah, no, I mean, this is a, you know, we're staring down the barrel of like a truly demonic society where every person that's walking around has, you know, comes at the cost of 12 undesirables who were killed so that that one child could come into existence.
00:39:07.400I have no problem with, you know, the desire to cure these genetic disorders.
00:39:12.220I think sort of the opposite extreme you can go to is just to try to say something like, oh, everyone's perfect just the way they are.
00:39:19.440And, you know, all disabilities are socially constructed anyway, blah, blah, blah.
00:39:22.820No, you know, natural law would also reject that idea.
00:39:25.380We know what a flourishing human looks like.
00:39:26.960And the Catholic Church has, in fact, said in its bioethical documents that they are not opposed to gene therapies that could fix these in utero, that if you, you know, get pregnant with a Down syndrome child and there's a genetic therapy that could be used to correct that child's genome in utero, that there is no problem with that and no barrier, no moral barrier to doing that.
00:39:46.520You know, my objection is to throwing out these children and also to decoupling reproduction from the sexual act.
00:39:56.400It really changes the relationship from parent-child to consumer product.
00:40:03.120You know, you have this child that you custom ordered.
00:40:05.680We've already seen examples of this mindset where people have, you know, sued the IVF companies that were supposed to be screening and said, well, I wanted a boy and I got a girl.
00:40:15.060Or, you know, I wanted a healthy baby and I got a baby that has this disorder.
00:40:19.140You know, this is, you know, not a kind of healthy world in which to bring children.
00:40:25.160You know, my daughter, who's two years old, comes to my wife and I as a gift from the hand of God, right?
00:40:33.580You know, whether you want to take that metaphorically or literally, but she is the child that we have been given and it's our duty as parents to love her, you know, however she comes to us.
00:40:44.660If we had had the opportunity to sort of customize her ahead of time and order her, you know, the way we would, you know, like customize all her traits on a website, I don't think it would be possible to love her as much as this gift that's been given to my wife and I through the love that we have for each other.
00:41:09.460What about Neuralink or any of the other brain-computer interfaces?
00:41:13.940Obviously, there's potential for healing.
00:41:16.140You give people who are locked in or at least severely paralyzed the ability to interact with the world.
00:41:21.320You also maybe have the possibility of upgrading human intellect by having a permanent Google brain.
00:41:28.180And where do you draw the line on brain modification and brain-computer interfaces?
00:41:34.040Yeah, I mean, it's very good marketing on behalf of Neuralink because the first guy that they gave one to was, you know, a quadriplegic who wanted to use it so he could move a mouse around with his mind so he could play civilization with his buddies and do an online Bible study.
00:41:46.800And Mario Kart, which, by the way, as far as that goes, that's the only line that they didn't cross.
00:41:50.780I feel like it's good that he was able to play Mario Kart.
00:41:53.900Mario Kart is actually one of John Finnis' fundamental human goods that we can deduce from human nature, yeah, through natural law.
00:42:03.720Yeah, I think many of these technologies are useful as tools but become a problem when they're used as just sort of fundamental upgrades, you know, air quotes, to human nature, right?
00:42:15.480So, you know, something like kind of a neural interface with an, you know, imagine you could strap on a pair of robotic arms that could lift, you know, two tons and use those on a construction site.
00:42:29.100It would stop people from having, you know, work-related injuries over the course of their construction career.
00:42:34.480It would vastly improve worker efficiency.
00:42:37.440It would, you know, decrease construction costs probably over the long run.
00:42:40.580It would have all these great benefits.
00:42:42.240I don't have a problem with construction worker, you know, Joe Hardhat, clocking in at the beginning of the day, you know, puts on his neural helmet, puts on his robot arms, you know, starts lifting up girders and building the building.
00:42:55.820What I don't want is this guy to, you know, turn into Doc Ock from Spider-Man and the arms start whispering to him and now he goes home with the arms still on and moves through the world.
00:43:05.500You know, just his new default is I'm a, you know, four-armed transhuman cyborg now.
00:43:24.060But, you know, they lay out in a very sane and rational way how, to go back to your example of eyeglasses, right, that the human eye and its natural state is going to be flawed but useful.
00:43:35.380But human eye with glasses are going to be even more useful.
00:43:39.660Night vision now gives you a completely new sense in a way.
00:43:43.340And then it's only, you know, a few more clicks, at least in this perspective, to genetically altering humans for perfect vision or maybe even bionic eyeballs, right?
00:43:53.540And I wonder then, like, for them, the rationale is national security.
00:43:57.540If we don't cyborgize our soldiers, we don't have super soldiers, then China will or somebody will.
00:44:05.220Do you buy that justification for radical human augmentation that whether it be national security or even something as menial as, I don't know, finance, that to an extent this augmentation is either baked in or you get left behind?
00:44:24.200Well, I think there's, you know, you can certainly make kind of practical arguments like that.
00:44:28.160I'm definitely sympathetic to the argument that if we don't try to build some kind of AI that China is going to surpass us and just eat everybody's lunch.
00:44:34.640And they have no qualms about how to apply transhumanist technologies, certainly.
00:44:41.020But I think you have to ask yourself the question, like, what are we ultimately fighting to preserve?
00:44:45.600Like, what is the what is the end goal here?
00:44:48.240And I think that by making those kinds of compromises, we're sort of giving up the game like, you know, it will you know, if we win, there's no we left.
00:44:59.180You know, I'm like I said, I think the proper framework to use is, you know, is this a tool or is this a modification of us as humans?
00:45:07.040You know, night vision goggles, you put them on, you take them off, whatever.
00:45:09.540Or maybe someday we come up with some kind of bionic augmentation that, you know, can allow soldiers to toggle between night vision using their own eyes.
00:45:22.320But I would not want that to become something that they would then carry back into civilian life and have this new capacity or functionality that human beings don't by nature have where they could then, you know, go to the bar and use it as a parlor trick.
00:45:35.700Yeah, turn out all the groping parties.
00:45:49.480So the question, then, of Christians facing a society in which the wealthiest men on earth, supported by the most powerful government on earth, governments, really, the United States and China and to some extent, Russia and certainly around Europe, the zeitgeist of the age, as you describe quite beautifully in your book, the zeitgeist of the age is transhuman, at least from an elite perspective.
00:46:17.520A lot of times, you know, I think especially post-2020, people look at like the World Economic Forum, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Great Reset, people like Yuval Noah Harari and the concept of Homo Deus, and they think, OK, transhumanism is this globalist thing.
00:46:34.120Transhumanism is this liberal project.
00:46:36.380But, you know, one of the things that we're definitely fellow travelers on is calling out the right wing strains of transhumanism and even the Christian strains of transhumanism.
00:46:50.100Do you find that arguing for limitations on technological adoption with Christians or people, other people on the right is more difficult?
00:47:00.320And what arguments do you make to the Christian or to the conservative that there is a line, that you've gone too far in crossing?
00:47:10.020Yeah, well, so the right wing transhumanists I write about in my book, my two big examples are kind of sort of the techno, the tech right, you know.
00:47:35.760We need to create these technologies bigger and faster, move fast and break things.
00:47:39.060The thing you're breaking in this instance is humanity.
00:47:42.000And then you kind of have the other side of right wing transhumanism is the sort of push for eugenics that you're getting from kind of the vitalist side, you know, the Bronze Age mindset people.
00:47:52.820What these these people have in common is kind of a contempt for humanity as such, for un-augmented humanity, for the idea that there is intrinsic human value.
00:48:03.620Interestingly, Andreessen tries to kind of appropriate this language of eudaimonia.
00:48:09.780But what he fails to see is that there there's a, you know, normative aspect to it, that it's rooted in our human nature, that it's not just this free floating pursuit of whatever we happen to desire.
00:48:20.480That that owes much more to, you know, Sartre than to somebody like Aristotle.
00:48:24.580When it comes to Christians, I think the key is reintroducing people to this natural law framework that I think has gotten lost, even for many self-described Christians today.
00:48:34.740One of the examples I include in the book is there was that Alabama Supreme Court ruling last year that was actually not particularly earth shattering.
00:48:42.520It just said, you know, the state has a wrongful death statute.
00:48:46.040You know, if you're pregnant and somebody hits your car with theirs and you have a miscarriage as a result, you can recover damages for the loss of your unborn child.
00:48:53.920And the Alabama Supreme Court basically ruled that, you know, if you do IVF and you've got frozen embryos in a lab and one of the lab techs knocks over the test tube and destroys your embryo, you can recover damages for that lost unborn child in the same way that you could in the car accident.
00:49:28.100What disappointed me was not the left's response, which is to be expected, but the right's response, which was immediately to say, like, no, no, we didn't mean it.
00:49:35.220You know, this is Alabama, supermajority GOP legislature, self-described, you know, conservative pro-life Republicans.
00:49:41.480Uh, immediately pass a law saying, no, no, you can do IVF.
00:49:49.540You know, national Republicans run away from the issue as fast as they can, denounce the Supreme, the Alabama Supreme Court decision.
00:49:56.020And it really shows how much people who are even self-described conservatives and even self-described Christians have adopted this mindset.
00:50:03.940There was a free press article about the whole thing that I quote from where this woman basically says, you know, oh, I was for it in the beginning.
00:50:10.220But then I was like, oh, you mean I can't just have my frozen embryos thrown away?
00:50:14.560I can't just, you know, vivisect my my unborn children at will.
00:50:19.580You know, they're not real in the same way that my child, you know, sitting in my living room watching TV is real.
00:50:23.960And it's like, well, you've you've adopted this transhumanist mindset.
00:50:27.980You've adopted this idea of the human as kind of the disembodied will.
00:50:32.460And because your embryos neither have a will of their own that they can assert, nor are they being willed into existence by you.
00:50:37.820So they have no validity, whereas if you take, you know, a sort of classical or Christian idea of, you know, human dignity as as stemming from our embodiment, from our membership just in the human species, then no, there is no difference between these frozen embryos and your son watching TV.
00:50:55.260They're both equally members of of the human species and share in the human telos.
00:50:58.920Well, brother, I could go on with you on this for hours, but our time has come to a close.
00:51:05.680Grayson, I really appreciate your intellect, your courage and your proper pronunciation of Greek terms.
00:51:40.460And also go to Birch Gold dot com slash Bannon or text Bannon to nine eight nine eight nine eight for your free copy of the ultimate guide for gold in the Trump era.
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