Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 836： Resisting The Transhumanist Temptation： A Conversation With Grayson Quay

00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies,

00:00:09.000 because we're going medieval on these people.

00:00:12.000 Here's one time I got a free shot

00:00:14.000 at all these networks lying about the people.

00:00:17.000 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.000 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,

00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.000 Mega Media.

00:00:29.000 I wish in my soul,

00:00:31.000 I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.000 Ask yourself,

00:00:35.000 what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.000 If that answer is to save my country,

00:00:41.000 this country will be saved.

00:00:44.000 War Room.

00:00:45.000 Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

00:00:54.000 Good evening.

00:00:55.000 I'm Joe Allen sitting in for Stephen K. Bannon.

00:00:58.000 And with me tonight is Grayson Quay,

00:01:02.000 author of the new book,

00:01:04.000 The Transhumanist Temptation. 1.00

00:01:07.000 How technology and ideology are reshaping humanity

00:01:11.000 and how to resist it.

00:01:13.000 Grayson, I really appreciate you coming on.

00:01:15.000 And we look forward to hearing a little bit more

00:01:17.000 about your perspective on transhumanism,

00:01:19.000 Christianity,

00:01:20.000 and who knows,

00:01:21.000 maybe crass jokes

00:01:23.000 from the,

00:01:24.000 in the vein of BAP.

00:01:26.000 We'll see what you got for us.

00:01:27.000 Thank you for having me on.

00:01:28.000 Looking forward to covering all of it.

00:01:30.000 Well, first off, Grayson,

00:01:31.000 I just want to get an idea.

00:01:33.000 Now,

00:01:34.000 I have read quite a bit of this book.

00:01:36.000 It's excellent.

00:01:37.000 And I understand your central argument

00:01:41.000 really against transhumanism

00:01:43.000 is not from the basis of humanism,

00:01:45.000 but rather from the basis of a deeply Christian

00:01:48.000 or spiritual perspective.

00:01:50.000 Can you just let the audience in on your thesis

00:01:53.000 and tell us what's the central thrust of the book?

00:01:56.000 Yeah.

00:01:57.000 So the title's The Transhumanist Temptation. 0.96

00:01:59.000 My original working title was actually The Serpent's Promise.

00:02:02.000 I wanted to get transhumanism into the title.

00:02:04.000 That's nice and subtle,

00:02:05.000 but you know how publishers are, right?

00:02:06.000 Yeah, you got to get that SEO, right?

00:02:08.000 But yeah,

00:02:09.000 my central thesis is that I don't think that transhumanism

00:02:12.000 is necessarily this weird new science fiction fringe thing,

00:02:16.000 which, you know,

00:02:17.000 a lot of people view it that way

00:02:18.000 and it causes them to, I think,

00:02:19.000 write it off and to really not be fully aware

00:02:22.000 of the threat that it poses.

00:02:23.000 My thesis is that the transhumanist temptation

00:02:26.000 goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden,

00:02:28.000 that it's the serpent's promise,

00:02:29.000 you shall be as gods,

00:02:31.000 and specifically that you can be like God

00:02:34.000 apart from a relationship with God,

00:02:36.000 apart from a relationship to your creator,

00:02:39.000 and that you can find ways to transcend your humanity

00:02:44.000 in this way.

00:02:45.000 And yeah, that, you know,

00:02:48.000 so that mindset, once that's in place,

00:02:50.000 all you're really doing is waiting for the technological means

00:02:52.000 to put it into effect,

00:02:54.000 and today those are arriving very, very rapidly,

00:02:57.000 more quickly than many of us can even keep track of.

00:02:59.000 Now, you would maybe argue that transhumanism in general

00:03:04.000 comes from an atheistic or at least a naturalistic perspective,

00:03:09.000 that human beings are responsible for our own lot here on Earth.

00:03:14.000 Would you agree with that?

00:03:16.000 Yeah, so I think that the opposite of transhumanism in many ways 0.71

00:03:19.000 is an idea of natural law,

00:03:21.000 of the idea that here's what human nature is,

00:03:24.000 here's the kind of beings that we are,

00:03:26.000 and that we can actually extrapolate things about how we should live,

00:03:29.000 what the good life for humans looks like from the kind of beings that we are,

00:03:33.000 you know, as rational animals but also as embodied beings.

00:03:36.000 Eudaimonia, you really emphasize that concept from Aristotle.

00:03:40.000 Yeah, it's this Aristotelian idea, you know,

00:03:42.000 it carries forward into St. Thomas Aquinas.

00:03:44.000 It's also present in the Hebrew scriptures.

00:03:46.000 You have this idea of wisdom or chokmah, 0.98

00:03:48.000 and I'm probably not Fleming that enough,

00:03:51.000 but yeah, I kind of really lean into it.

00:03:53.000 But yeah, this idea shows up in Proverbs too, right?

00:03:57.000 The chokmah is used as wisdom,

00:03:59.000 but it's also used as kind of like skill or craft

00:04:01.000 to describe the people who are helping to build the tabernacle in Exodus, for example.

00:04:06.000 So the fact that that's the same word

00:04:08.000 suggests that there's an art or a craft to living well as a human,

00:04:11.000 that, you know, this is what wisdom is.

00:04:13.000 It's following the path of flourishing that's been laid out for us

00:04:17.000 by the God who created us as the kind of beings that we are.

00:04:20.000 And I think that, yeah, transhumanism takes this,

00:04:23.000 requires this naturalistic worldview in many ways

00:04:26.000 because once you've really leaned into kind of a Darwinist view of human evolution,

00:04:33.000 that everything is just flux, it's just guided by blind physical forces.

00:04:37.000 Well, then suddenly there is no ought attached to the is.

00:04:41.000 We can't discern anything about what the good life looks like for humans

00:04:46.000 or how we ought to live from the kind of beings that we are,

00:04:49.000 because the kind of beings that we are is a complete accident.

00:04:52.000 So you end up with a view that defines human flourishing in terms of this radical freedom

00:04:59.000 to define yourself, this kind of existentialist freedom that, like,

00:05:02.000 Jean-Paul Sartre would talk about where your existence precedes your essence.

00:05:06.000 You know, the meaning of life is just to give life meaning.

00:05:09.000 You have to decide what it means to be a good human.

00:05:12.000 You have to decide what it means to be a human in general.

00:05:15.000 And once you've accepted that, you've basically thrown out the idea of humanity,

00:05:21.000 of the human person as a union of body and soul,

00:05:23.000 and you've substituted this deification of the individual will,

00:05:27.000 which is now why we have, you know, a medical system in this country

00:05:31.000 where the purpose of medicine used to be guided by a sense of, you know, teleology,

00:05:37.000 by a sense that we know what human nature is.

00:05:39.000 We know what a flourishing human looks like by this definition of human nature,

00:05:43.000 and the purpose of medicine is to restore you to that flourishing.

00:05:46.000 Now the purpose is to cater to the individual's will and the individual's desires.

00:05:51.000 You know, to someone, you know, like Hippocrates or anyone, you know,

00:05:56.000 rooted in this natural law tradition,

00:05:58.000 it would be madness to suggest that I could go to the doctor and say, 0.98

00:06:02.000 I would like you to cut off my genitals or I would like you to give me hormones 1.00

00:06:09.000 to make me more like a woman. 1.00

00:06:11.000 This would be an insane idea because they would say, no, you're a man. 0.98

00:06:15.000 You know, if something is wrong with your genitals, not that there is anything, 0.97

00:06:20.000 I don't want to imply that to the audience,

00:06:21.000 but if something's wrong with your body or in any way, we can restore you to flourishing.

00:06:26.000 What we're not going to do is take a part of you that's healthy and cut it off

00:06:29.000 or take a, you know, normal, healthy bodily function and disrupt it in some way

00:06:34.000 in order to cater to your desires.

00:06:36.000 And that's what so much of medicine is now from, you know, birth control and abortion to transgenderism. 0.98

00:06:41.000 You're friends with Mary Harrington.

00:06:43.000 I know her a little bit. Yeah, we haven't met in person, but we've interacted.

00:06:46.000 I don't agree with her philosophical standpoint on this phrase,

00:06:52.000 but I absolutely love the phrase from her book, Feminism Against Progress.

00:06:56.000 Meet Lego Gnosticism to transcend one's physical body by cutting it apart

00:07:03.000 and rearranging it like sort of physiological Mr. Potato Head.

00:07:07.000 Without going into the Gnostic question, maybe a bit later in the conversation,

00:07:14.000 I would like to hit on the religious perspective that you came from when writing this book.

00:07:22.000 It's very clear that you're critiquing from a Christian perspective and also, as you told me,

00:07:31.000 a Catholic perspective to an extent.

00:07:34.000 Can you tell us how did you come about writing this book

00:07:38.000 and a little bit more about the spiritual grounding that you yourself are coming from?

00:07:44.000 Yeah. So the way I came to write this book, it's I started freelance writing back in 2016.

00:07:50.000 So it's been almost 10 years now. Goodness.

00:07:53.000 But I never really established a clear beat for myself, or at least I didn't think I had.

00:07:57.000 I had all these different kind of very disparate interests.

00:08:00.000 You know, over here, I was really interested in bioethical issues.

00:08:03.000 So I was writing about abortion and surrogacy and artificial wombs and all these other things.

00:08:07.000 I was interested in technology and kind of virtual reality, augmented reality, the movement toward that, AI, different things like that.

00:08:16.000 I got really interested.

00:08:17.000 Did you try the good stuff, virtual reality?

00:08:20.000 Have you taken a trip on the good stuff?

00:08:22.000 What's that?

00:08:23.000 HTC displays and, you know, very vivid.

00:08:28.000 Yeah, I've done kind of demos with things like that. It's certainly interesting and it's kind of fun to do as a as a toy.

00:08:35.000 But please go on.

00:08:37.000 Yeah. No, I was.

00:08:38.000 So 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?

00:08:52.000 And could it be possible to orient a politics around some shared ideal of human flourishing that's deeper than that?

00:08:59.000 I got really interested in kind of new right economics and the economic nationalist side.

00:09:03.000 Like, 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.

00:09:13.000 And 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.

00:09:22.000 And then suddenly I had kind of an epiphany where I realized the thread connecting all of this was transhumanism.

00:09:29.000 And from that insight kind of came this book.

00:09:32.000 Tell me this, from a family man perspective, what is your ideal for human flourishing?

00:09:41.000 Well, I think there are certain human goods that you can deduce from human nature.

00:09:47.000 You 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.

00:10:11.000 They really mean eudaimonia when they say happiness, like they all have this robust understanding of natural law or almost all do.

00:10:18.000 Alexander Hamilton gets into it a lot in his essay, Farmer Refuted, which I'd highly recommend to everyone.

00:10:23.000 He 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.

00:10:36.000 But 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.

00:10:50.000 But unfortunately, we've gotten to the point where I think the only human goods we recognize are individual autonomy and GDP growth.

00:10:56.460 Yeah, I feel that. What are some of these human goods? And I'm not familiar with John Finnis.

00:11:02.840 Yeah. So he mentions aesthetic appreciation, marriage and family.

00:11:10.020 I'd have to pull up the thing to get the full list. I think he has about nine of them.

00:11:14.580 You 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.

00:11:23.480 These are all things that you can kind of deduce just from what we know ourselves to be as humans.

00:11:29.220 This 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.

00:11:43.380 It's not that revelation is this extrinsic thing imposing obligations on you that are completely unrooted in the kind of creature that you are.

00:11:51.840 That would be sort of a cruel cosmic joke if God were to have done something like that, I think.

00:11:56.240 And I mean, you know, there's a natural law tradition that is present in Christianity.

00:11:59.720 Yes. But, you know, that you can find in Aristotle, who obviously was not a Christian.

00:12:05.220 Yeah, 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.

00:12:13.140 And there's, you know, some modern kind of secular natural law thinkers as well.

00:12:16.860 Yeah, 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.

00:12:31.780 When 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.

00:12:47.960 You 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. 0.97

00:13:07.400 And so I think transhumanism or many, if not most, not all transhumanists.

00:13:12.460 Sorry, can I jump in on the evolution?

00:13:13.700 Yeah, so I think, yeah, there's a reason that transhumanism is often framed in kind of evolutionary terms.

00:13:19.380 Julian 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.

00:13:27.160 But 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.

00:13:37.340 We didn't ask for the job, but now we have it and we have to direct human evolution using these tools that we have.

00:13:42.400 G.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.

00:13:51.140 Chesterton says that, you know, as a Catholic, him writing, he says, I don't object to the theory of evolution.

00:13:58.240 I think it's totally possible that God could have used the evolutionary process to produce the kind of beings he wanted to create.

00:14:04.700 Because 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.

00:14:11.460 If you look at it that way, it doesn't pose any threat to some idea of natural law.

00:14:15.600 You can still get an ought out of the is of the kind of beings that we are.

00:14:19.000 Chesterton's fear was if you adopt kind of this Darwinist or evolutionary view as a philosophy and you just say, well, everything is flux.

00:14:27.120 It's, you know, there's no definition of human nature because it's something that's always changing.

00:14:32.960 And 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.

00:14:41.400 Like 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.

00:14:48.240 Right. 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.

00:15:00.600 But 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.

00:15:10.780 And then you've fully jumped into the transhumanist realm.

00:15:15.440 So it's it raises a lot of interesting and thorny questions.

00:15:19.760 Julian Huxley's close friend, Teilhard Deschardins, I didn't know they were friends.

00:15:26.200 That's interesting. Yeah, he actually chances are Julian Huxley got the term from him.

00:15:31.200 Deschardins had written about the progress of humanity and the scope of technological development and kind of coined the term.

00:15:41.120 And 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.

00:15:50.540 So it seems to be like the chain of custody of transhumanism, as you point out, from Dante to Verdansky.

00:15:58.140 Sorry, Vladimir, if I'm mispronouncing or miss saying your name, to Teilhard Deschardins and then Julian Huxley.

00:16:05.860 And I've always found it interesting with Huxley.

00:16:08.740 You know, he is taking a very scientific perspective on this.

00:16:12.820 He's basically an atheist, despite all of his his nods to religion as a positive cultural force.

00:16:19.160 And he's and Huxley is arguing mainly from a cultural standpoint, that human beings can evolve through scientific knowledge of the species.

00:16:29.520 And it doesn't really touch on technology, although obviously that grows out of it.

00:16:34.100 I 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.

00:16:45.300 Yeah, I think Julian Huxley kind of suffered from a failure of imagination.

00:16:49.040 You know, you read his essay and he talks about transhumanism and then it's like, oh, what are we going to do with transhumanism?

00:16:53.120 And it's like, we're going to have better education and cleaner cities.

00:16:56.340 And it's like, OK, you know, kind of, you know, I describe it as cultural eugenics. 0.88

00:17:01.140 Yeah, he believed in real eugenics, too, of course, president of the British Eugenics Society.

00:17:06.780 Yeah, they go hand in hand that you should be sterilized involuntarily if you were out of work for too long.

00:17:11.800 I don't think he was so harsh, but yeah, his compatriots definitely were.

00:17:16.440 You 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?

00:17:28.800 I mean, obviously he was condemned for heresy, although I don't think he was excommunicated.

00:17:33.800 But 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.

00:17:49.520 And so I guess.

00:17:52.020 Well, 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.

00:17:56.900 You know, there's a parallel to you mentioned like Peking man to humanity is to human is transhuman man, the Julian Huxley thing.

00:18:04.100 There's a really close parallel, actually, to that statement in St. Paul, where he I think it's in First Corinthians.

00:18:08.720 He says, you know, the way that you plant a seed and then it grows into a plant.

00:18:13.100 And from looking at the seed, you could never guess what the plant would be, what the plant would look like full grown.

00:18:18.320 He 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?

00:18:27.980 So the end of the ultimate telos of humanity, you know, is not the creatures we are today.

00:18:34.800 It 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?

00:18:44.800 Deification is the Greek term, to be sons of God equal to the angels, as Christ said in one of the Gospels.

00:18:51.880 So that's really the ultimate telos of humanity.

00:18:55.720 The thing is, we're not called to bootstrap ourselves into that state through, you know, technological meanings.

00:19:02.960 And 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.

00:19:17.920 That becomes the vehicle for our salvation.

00:19:20.580 The human nature that we share with Christ enables us to eventually come and reign with him in glory forever.

00:19:26.780 You know, God became man that man might become God.

00:19:29.040 And 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.

00:19:41.620 That's the serpent's promise, right?

00:19:42.920 That's the transhumanist temptation.

00:19:44.580 You achieve it actually by living and actually suffering as a human.

00:19:49.820 And that's what we can see in the, you know, the saints and the martyrs and everything.

00:19:53.120 I 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?

00:20:07.040 It's just simply a techno-positive sort of techno-optimist Christian point of view.

00:20:14.360 And 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.

00:20:27.020 So 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.

00:20:45.020 There'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.

00:20:55.100 And it would appear that there is a kind of pre-programmed, a front-loaded purpose to the technological project.

00:21:05.020 Now, I'm very much on the Luddite end of the spectrum, although very much a failed Luddite.

00:21:11.360 But I do appreciate this notion.

00:21:13.480 I'm curious, then, where is the line for you?

00:21:16.340 Like, where, how far is too far?

00:21:18.000 Yeah, 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.

00:21:38.540 But 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.

00:21:48.840 I 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.

00:21:55.480 Yeah, yeah, I love doing the Enoch stuff.

00:21:58.060 But, 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. 0.86

00:22:04.640 And, you know, interesting parallels to today.

00:22:08.620 We 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.

00:22:24.700 You know, the Nephilim are the original transhumans here in this way. 0.99

00:22:27.900 And God's response to this is...

00:22:30.120 Are you familiar with the...

00:22:31.040 Sorry.

00:22:31.240 Yeah, that this poses such a threat to creation that I have to send the flood.

00:22:35.200 Are you familiar with Timothy Alberino's work on this?

00:22:38.440 Oh, I don't think so.

00:22:39.180 Yeah, he's done a lot of work.

00:22:42.240 You 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.

00:22:54.240 I take a more, let's say, allegorical perspective on it, but isn't it a genocidal racist story?

00:23:02.960 Aren't these hybrids? 0.99

00:23:04.340 Isn't this basically like an anti-miscegenation lesson?

00:23:07.640 I don't know.

00:23:08.500 I've never encountered a reading like that.

00:23:10.460 I would say it's not an insegenation.

00:23:14.220 I mean, you know, demons aren't a race of humans.

00:23:17.640 They certainly seem to be described that way.

00:23:19.960 They have the equipment to mate with the daughters of men. 1.00

00:23:23.320 Well, 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.

00:23:32.420 It'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.

00:23:44.200 Um, 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.

00:24:05.000 Mm, and that's with the Babylonians too.

00:24:07.300 Yeah, this is what the Babylonians are doing, yeah, and that that's producing that, uh, that offspring. 0.98

00:24:11.700 So 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.

00:24:38.100 Uh, 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.

00:24:50.100 You 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.

00:25:02.100 That's exactly where I was going to segue. So looking forward to it.

00:25:05.280 So, uh, coming back in just a moment, but before we go, birchgold.com slash Bannon, that's birchgold.com slash Bannon. The petrodollar is crumbling before our eyes.

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00:31:34.840 All right, War Room Posse, we are back.

00:31:38.700 And I'm here with Grayson Quay, author of The Transhumanist Temptation, a fantastic book from Crisis Publications.

00:31:47.820 And Grayson, I want to talk a little bit about the practical difficulties that transhumanism and techno-optimism pose for Christians. 0.65

00:32:00.020 Something that we cover a lot is the eugenic underpinnings of transhumanism and the current projects to, for instance, select embryos pre-implantation.

00:32:12.360 Basically, you produce 10, 15, maybe 20 embryos and then select the supreme one and hook the rest into the cherub ward. 0.63

00:32:22.080 Yeah, yeah. I'm against that just for practical purposes.

00:32:24.560 I wouldn't have wanted my parents to be like, oh, this one's going to go bald in his 20s.

00:32:28.960 Swipe left. 0.99

00:32:30.020 Yeah, you know, if it had been my mom's choice, I probably would have been taller, smarter, and quieter.

00:32:37.020 But, you know, she chose wisely, I think.

00:32:40.400 Also, too, there are other real barriers, you know, that I think a lot of Christians see these as sacred boundaries you do not cross.

00:32:48.700 You look at Elon Musk's project with Neuralink.

00:32:51.740 Peter Thiel has kind of a parallel project with BlackRock Neurotech.

00:32:56.720 And you have Synchron invested in by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

00:33:01.420 And 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.

00:33:19.560 So looking at all these different things, even, hey, just even the smartphone, right?

00:33:24.240 So for you, where are these lines?

00:33:27.880 Where are the barriers?

00:33:29.220 And why should Christians reject this? 0.98

00:33:31.840 If 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? 0.99

00:33:42.140 Yeah, 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?

00:33:53.940 One 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.

00:34:01.140 We got to just throw rocks, you know, sharpen sticks are an abomination, right?

00:34:05.560 But 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?

00:34:18.940 And I think that natural law provides that framework.

00:34:23.000 So just to give a few quick examples, people will say like, oh, you're already a transhumanist.

00:34:26.900 You 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.

00:34:33.780 To me, none of these are transhumanist technologies.

00:34:36.560 We know what an eye is for.

00:34:37.880 The excellence of the eye is to see, right?

00:34:40.020 This is very, you know, platonic Aristotelian, right?

00:34:42.240 We know what an eye is for.

00:34:43.100 If 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.

00:34:54.880 You 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.

00:35:03.320 If 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.

00:35:10.720 Now, if you want to replace my hand with a laser gun, now we're in transhumanist territory. 0.82

00:35:15.040 If you lost your hand, would you replace it with a laser gun?

00:35:19.380 It sounds pretty cool, but no, I don't think so.

00:35:21.580 Maybe a hook. 1.00

00:35:22.180 I think it would be wrong.

00:35:22.940 Yeah, well, a hook's kind of like an attempt at an approximation, right?

00:35:26.360 We've gotten a little better at it now, though.

00:35:29.600 And I think that this is really sad because I want to be a tech optimist.

00:35:32.940 I 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.

00:35:41.860 But unfortunately, we just don't have the ability to draw the line.

00:35:44.700 One example I go into in my book is artificial wombs. 0.99

00:35:48.720 So there's actually a wonderful application of artificial wombs, potential application of artificial wombs.

00:35:54.440 We don't have the technology yet that we can use for humans.

00:35:56.600 They've tried to grow, you know, a lamb embryo in a bag.

00:35:59.220 Yeah, the bio bag.

00:35:59.980 Yeah, 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. 0.99

00:36:11.400 Or 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.

00:36:25.520 You're not trying to kill the child.

00:36:26.900 You're trying to save the mother's life, treating the child as a second patient. 0.90

00:36:29.560 But unfortunately, there's no chance of saving it.

00:36:31.960 If 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.

00:36:42.860 And in that case, everybody lives.

00:36:44.380 The mother and the child both get to survive.

00:36:46.580 Interestingly, 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. 1.00

00:36:56.740 Yeah, 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.

00:37:01.740 My friend Jennifer Billick, she wrote the book Trans, Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman.

00:37:09.100 And 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.

00:37:22.280 Yeah. Well, they want this to become the new norm.

00:37:23.900 You see this with North Siddiqui and the the orchid embryo screening thing where she says, like, sex should just be for fun.

00:37:29.280 Embryo screening should be for babies.

00:37:30.620 Like, no, no children should be conceived through sex anymore.

00:37:33.140 That's, in fact, reckless on that note.

00:37:35.740 I mean, you've got like Sam Altman has invested in conception, which does the same.

00:37:40.540 What's the guy's name?

00:37:41.140 Steve Sue, if I'm pronouncing his Chinese name properly.

00:37:44.280 And then Orchid Health and a number of other operations.

00:37:48.340 You know, they're doing everything possible to resuscitate the eugenic project with the preimplantation genetic screening.

00:37:57.160 And 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.

00:38:17.740 And, of course, then it would also take it out of the gene pool.

00:38:20.200 Well, screening doesn't save the child from having that disorder.

00:38:22.500 It just kills the children that have that disorder.

00:38:24.300 Yes, well, it preserves.

00:38:26.360 But 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.

00:38:36.080 But from your perspective, and especially from the Catholic perspective, you said it right there.

00:38:42.160 I mean, you literally are creating anywhere from 5 to 15 to 20 embryos that you then shuffle off to the cherub ward.

00:38:50.120 Does that raise all the red flags?

00:38:52.940 Yeah, 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.

00:39:07.400 I have no problem with, you know, the desire to cure these genetic disorders.

00:39:12.220 I 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.

00:39:19.440 And, you know, all disabilities are socially constructed anyway, blah, blah, blah.

00:39:22.820 No, you know, natural law would also reject that idea.

00:39:25.380 We know what a flourishing human looks like.

00:39:26.960 And 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.

00:39:46.520 You know, my objection is to throwing out these children and also to decoupling reproduction from the sexual act. 0.79

00:39:56.400 It really changes the relationship from parent-child to consumer product.

00:40:03.120 You know, you have this child that you custom ordered.

00:40:05.680 We'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.

00:40:15.060 Or, you know, I wanted a healthy baby and I got a baby that has this disorder.

00:40:19.140 You know, this is, you know, not a kind of healthy world in which to bring children.

00:40:25.160 You know, my daughter, who's two years old, comes to my wife and I as a gift from the hand of God, right?

00:40:33.580 You 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.

00:40:44.660 If 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.

00:41:03.240 And all those surprises, right?

00:41:04.740 Exactly.

00:41:05.080 A lot of faith there.

00:41:07.040 And it's a beautiful faith.

00:41:08.680 Absolutely.

00:41:09.460 What about Neuralink or any of the other brain-computer interfaces?

00:41:13.940 Obviously, there's potential for healing.

00:41:16.140 You give people who are locked in or at least severely paralyzed the ability to interact with the world.

00:41:21.320 You also maybe have the possibility of upgrading human intellect by having a permanent Google brain.

00:41:28.180 And where do you draw the line on brain modification and brain-computer interfaces?

00:41:34.040 Yeah, 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.

00:41:46.800 And Mario Kart, which, by the way, as far as that goes, that's the only line that they didn't cross.

00:41:50.780 I feel like it's good that he was able to play Mario Kart.

00:41:52.700 It's a virtuous and noble game.

00:41:53.900 Mario Kart is actually one of John Finnis' fundamental human goods that we can deduce from human nature, yeah, through natural law.

00:42:03.720 Yeah, 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?

00:42:15.480 So, 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.

00:42:28.220 This would be great.

00:42:29.100 It would stop people from having, you know, work-related injuries over the course of their construction career.

00:42:34.480 It would vastly improve worker efficiency.

00:42:37.440 It would, you know, decrease construction costs probably over the long run.

00:42:40.580 It would have all these great benefits.

00:42:42.240 I 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.

00:42:55.100 Cyborg exoskeleton.

00:42:55.820 What 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.

00:43:05.500 You know, just his new default is I'm a, you know, four-armed transhuman cyborg now.

00:43:09.760 It's a difficult question.

00:43:11.600 There's a document that we talk a lot about, the human augmentation, the dawn of a new paradigm.

00:43:18.580 It was produced for the UK Ministry of Defense.

00:43:22.060 I think it came out 2021.

00:43:24.060 But, 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.

00:43:35.380 But human eye with glasses are going to be even more useful.

00:43:39.660 Night vision now gives you a completely new sense in a way.

00:43:43.340 And 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?

00:43:53.540 And I wonder then, like, for them, the rationale is national security.

00:43:57.540 If we don't cyborgize our soldiers, we don't have super soldiers, then China will or somebody will. 0.97

00:44:05.220 Do 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?

00:44:24.200 Well, I think there's, you know, you can certainly make kind of practical arguments like that.

00:44:28.160 I'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. 0.92

00:44:34.640 And they have no qualms about how to apply transhumanist technologies, certainly.

00:44:41.020 But I think you have to ask yourself the question, like, what are we ultimately fighting to preserve?

00:44:45.600 Like, what is the what is the end goal here?

00:44:48.240 And 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.

00:44:57.060 There's no there's no humanity left.

00:44:58.720 Right.

00:44:59.180 You 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?

00:45:07.040 You know, night vision goggles, you put them on, you take them off, whatever.

00:45:09.540 Or 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.

00:45:22.320 But 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.

00:45:35.700 Yeah, turn out all the groping parties.

00:45:39.820 I'm sure you'd be much more skilled.

00:45:42.140 Not that I've ever been to anything like that.

00:45:44.200 So the I never seem to get the invitation.

00:45:48.200 I don't either.

00:45:48.980 I'm getting too old.

00:45:49.480 So 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.

00:46:17.520 A 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.

00:46:34.120 Transhumanism is this liberal project.

00:46:36.380 But, 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.

00:46:50.100 Do you find that arguing for limitations on technological adoption with Christians or people, other people on the right is more difficult?

00:47:00.320 And 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?

00:47:10.020 Yeah, 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.

00:47:18.940 Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel.

00:47:19.920 Yeah, Marc Andreessen's my big example that, you know, Bannon's been feuding with quite a bit over different things.

00:47:24.380 And, you know, I'm very much a Bannonite in that argument.

00:47:28.360 Yeah, where these are people who, you know, are all in on the merge.

00:47:31.960 We need to, you know, we need to evolve.

00:47:34.860 We need to bootstrap ourselves.

00:47:35.760 We need to create these technologies bigger and faster, move fast and break things.

00:47:39.060 The thing you're breaking in this instance is humanity.

00:47:42.000 And 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.

00:47:52.820 What 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.

00:48:03.620 Interestingly, Andreessen tries to kind of appropriate this language of eudaimonia.

00:48:09.780 But 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.

00:48:20.480 That that owes much more to, you know, Sartre than to somebody like Aristotle.

00:48:24.580 When 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.

00:48:34.740 One 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.

00:48:42.520 It just said, you know, the state has a wrongful death statute.

00:48:46.040 You 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.

00:48:53.920 And 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.

00:49:10.320 You know, again, not a huge deal.

00:49:11.440 Just try not to knock over the test tubes.

00:49:13.100 Right.

00:49:13.300 But, you know, the left's response, of course, you know, to be expected is, you know, handmaid's tale dystopia.

00:49:19.080 Somebody set off a bomb outside the attorney general's office in Alabama.

00:49:23.280 You know, there's there's all the Kamala Harris weighs in on this thing. 1.00

00:49:26.260 It's it's a whole hysterical thing.

00:49:28.100 What 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.

00:49:35.220 You know, this is Alabama, supermajority GOP legislature, self-described, you know, conservative pro-life Republicans.

00:49:41.480 Uh, immediately pass a law saying, no, no, you can do IVF. 0.89

00:49:46.300 There's no liability there.

00:49:47.780 Republican governor signs it.

00:49:49.540 You know, national Republicans run away from the issue as fast as they can, denounce the Supreme, the Alabama Supreme Court decision.

00:49:56.020 And it really shows how much people who are even self-described conservatives and even self-described Christians have adopted this mindset.

00:50:03.940 There 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.

00:50:10.220 But then I was like, oh, you mean I can't just have my frozen embryos thrown away?

00:50:14.560 I can't just, you know, vivisect my my unborn children at will.

00:50:18.660 This is horrible.

00:50:19.580 You know, they're not real in the same way that my child, you know, sitting in my living room watching TV is real.

00:50:23.960 And it's like, well, you've you've adopted this transhumanist mindset.

00:50:27.980 You've adopted this idea of the human as kind of the disembodied will.

00:50:32.460 And because your embryos neither have a will of their own that they can assert, nor are they being willed into existence by you.

00:50:37.820 So 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.

00:50:55.260 They're both equally members of of the human species and share in the human telos.

00:50:58.920 Well, brother, I could go on with you on this for hours, but our time has come to a close.

00:51:05.680 Grayson, I really appreciate your intellect, your courage and your proper pronunciation of Greek terms.

00:51:11.840 I have a lot to learn there.

00:51:13.680 The book is The Transhumanist Temptation by Grayson Quay.

00:51:18.580 Where can we find it?

00:51:20.080 You can find it on Amazon.

00:51:22.040 It's available as an e-book in print like that, like it is right there or as an audio book.

00:51:25.820 If you hate my voice, good news.

00:51:27.700 I don't read the audio book.

00:51:28.580 There's a narrator who does that.

00:51:30.080 You can also get it.

00:51:31.140 It's always best to get it straight from the publisher.

00:51:33.260 So that'll be Sophia Institute dot com slash transhuman. 0.62

00:51:37.920 Thank you very much, Grayson.

00:51:39.340 I really appreciate it.

00:51:40.460 And 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.

00:51:50.560 Also go to TN USA dot com slash Bannon for the Tax Network USA advice on all your taxes or call one eight hundred nine five eight one thousand.

00:52:03.500 We're in Posse.

00:52:04.080 Thank you very much.

00:52:04.640 We will see you tomorrow.

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Bannon's War Room - August 25, 2025

WarRoom Battleground EP 836： Resisting The Transhumanist Temptation： A Conversation With Grayson Quay

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