by Fr. Florent Marignol, SSPX

What initial definition of transhumanism can we offer? According to the disciples of this ideology, man has supposedly reached a “critical” threshold in his evolution, which tends toward an ever more perfect mastery of human destiny, and it is now the moment for the men of our times to go beyond their own limits as set by nature. Indeed, the latest technological progress makes this possible, and the expected result is an “enhanced” humanity or a “posthumanity.”

To give an example, the World Transhumanist Association (now known as Humanity +) states that “humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to planet earth.”¹ Based on the assumption that man will, like it or not, undergo this sort of modification in the near future, transhumanists uphold “the moral right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. We seek personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.”² A superficial reader might take these for simple ramblings; but the more observant cannot help but notice that this ideology is promoted by the wealthiest men in the world: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, to mention only a few. As for philosophers and theologians, such declarations can only urge them to give serious consideration to this utopia that, by the breadth of its scope and the superior standing of its heralds, forces the Catholic voice to speak up.

History

To retrace the history of this ideology faithfully, we naturally need to look first at its profound roots, then go on to consider iits recent developments beginning with the start of the twentieth century.

In an article entitled “A History of Transhumanist Thought,”³ Nick Bostrom⁴ says that humanity today wishes to transcend its own biological limits, but that this dream has been around forever. In his opinion, this desire was expressed in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (around 1700 B.C.) and in the Greek myth of Prometheus’s theft. Over the ages, man has constantly sought to fulfill this desire, and Nick Bostrom lists the various protagonists who are the inspiration behind contemporary transhumanism, which is somewhat of an epilogue to this quest.

The first of these inspirations is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) who maintained that far from fixing man in a definitive form (that is, an essence), God gave him the power to fashion himself freely in order to attain a superior order bordering on the divine. Our author puts these words to Adam in the Creator’s mouth: “I have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”⁵ Pico was far from imagining the means that science and technology would one day offer to make this transformation possible.

Bostrom continues his genealogy of transhumanism with the English scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who hopes that science will one day “prolong life; restore youth to a certain extent; slow aging; […] increase strength and activity; transform stature; increase and heighten brain activity […]; exhilarate spirits and give them a good disposition.”⁶ Bostrom points out that in 1620, Bacon published Novum Organum (A New Tool) in which he proposes a methodology based on experimentation and empirical investigation rather than on a priori reasoning and in which he defends the project of “realizing everything possible,” in other words, using science to subdue nature in order to improve the living conditions of humans.

Bostrom goes on to mention Condorcet.⁷ Unlike the other precursors of transhumanism, Condorcet thought scientific and technological progress would offer the means to transform man: “May it not be expected that the human race will be meliorated by new discoveries in the sciences and the arts, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the means of individual and general prosperity; by further progress in the principles of conduct, and in moral practice; and lastly, by the real improvement of our faculties, moral, intellectual and physical, which may be the result either of the improvement of the instruments which increase the power and direct the exercise of those faculties, or of the improvement of our natural organization itself?

In examining the three questions we have enumerated, we shall find the strongest reasons to believe, from past experience, from observation of the progress which the sciences and civilization have hitherto made, and from the analysis of the march of the human understanding, and the development of its faculties, that nature has fixed no limits to our hopes.”⁸ Condorcet at least is clear. He speaks of an enhancement of man’s capacities by science which will give man access to immortality: “A period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit.”⁹

Bostrom ends with a decisive date in the genesis of transhumanism: the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859. This publication is the fruit of several years’ worth of work. It presents itself as being based on observations made aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin’s theory, which is revolutionary on the biological level, explains the evolution of species by natural selection of the fittest individuals in a given species.¹⁰ In his opinion, when a species proliferates in a given habitat, food resources grow rare and the individuals of the same species are not all equal in the struggle for life that ensues: some are better adapted to survive thanks to a stronger constitution or a physical advantage, others less so. The more apt individuals survive and reproduce with each other and the others die. The characteristics that allow for the best adaptation to the habitat are thus passed on to the following generations, which consequently have small mutations from what the individuals of the previous generation were overall. Because this mechanism is perpetual, the evolution of species is permanent, and since man is not immune to this process, Max More¹¹ concludes: “With the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the traditional view of humans as unique and fixed in nature gave way to the idea that humanity as it currently exists is one stage in an evolutionary development. Combined with the realization that humans are physical beings whose nature can be progressively better understood through science, this evolutionary perspective made it easy to see that human nature itself might be deliberately changed.”¹² Bostrom comments, paraphrasing Darwin, that “it has become increasingly plausible to view the current version of humanity not as the endpoint of evolution but rather as an early phase.”¹³

It is only one step from this biological explanation of the evolution of species to the system of transhumanism, and this step would soon be taken by several thinkers linked to the University of Oxford. The main one was Julian Huxley.¹⁴ He is the one who popularized the term “transhumanism,” coined by the French polytechnician Jean Coutrot.¹⁵ He is often presented as the founder of the movement, both because of the influence he gave it through his role in international institutions and his relations and because of his own declarations: “Let the mammal in us die, so that the man can live more completely.”¹⁶ In his opinion, “the ultimate human destiny is to direct the process of evolution and bring it to new heights by realizing the new possibilities for improving the quality of human existence.¹⁷

Contemporary Transhumanists

Julian Huxley thus gave birth to the contemporary version of transhumanism. Its idealistic and unrealistic nature would have confined this ideology to being no more than a harmless system of thought if it had not been taken seriously, supported and relayed by the planet’s most powerful businesses: GAFAMI¹⁸ for the western world and BATX¹⁹ for the Asian world.

Robert Ettinger²⁰ and F. M. Esfandiary,²¹ the former a philosopher and the latter a scientist, were the ones who gave transhumanism its precise and present form between 1950 and 1960. The Transhumanist Declaration published in 1998 at Nick Bostrom and David Pearce’s instigation helped give transhumanism its international dimension. It is presently upheld by a network of local associations, mostly in Europe and North America, with two globally influential hubs, one in California under Raymond Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis and one in Britain, under Nick Bostrom who directs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

The swift technological progress that has been made these past few years in the fields known as NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, and we have to add genetics) have had an undeniable impact on transhumanism, giving it its present version: this version is announcing for the near future a liberation from death (called the death of death by Dr. Laurent Alexandre), the enhancement of physical and cognitive capacities, and hybridization with machines. According to Moore’s law,²² this exponential technological progress will allow twenty-first-century men to go beyond their biological limits, to cross over them (from the Latin “trans”) in order to become “enhanced” men (a “humanity 2.0” as Raymond Kurzweil likes to say).

Thanks to genetic manipulations that will protect them from sickness and death, covered in microprocessors and computerized prosthetics, the men of the near future will have multiplied their capacities exponentially: they will hear frequencies the natural ear is unable to hear, they will be stronger, quicker, more intelligent and most importantly, connected.²³ In this perspective, humanity is heading for a turning point and a point of no return, called Singularity, beyond which human activity as we know it will be extinguished since there will no longer be a distinction between humans and machines. There are three principal motivations behind this race toward the annihilation of homo sapiens and the emergence of the enhanced human. First, the necessary and ineluctable mechanism of Darwinian evolution that is urging man to take this step. Those who do not want to evolve are going to be “the chimpanzees of the future”²⁴ whom people will go to zoos to see, the way we curiously examine the Neanderthal man in museums. The second motive is fear: fear of the development of artificial intelligence and the possibility that it may one day surpass human intelligence. The most recent performances by AI are stupefying²⁵ and if men do not vie with this calculating power by developing their own cognitive capacities, or if they do not make it their own by turning themselves into hybrids with microchips, they are likely to soon become definitively obsolete. In 2018, Elon Musk declared that artificial intelligence represents “a far greater threat to humanity than nuclear bombs.”²⁶ Desirous of avoiding this danger, Musk founded the company Neuralink to manufacture brain implants intended to graft artificial intelligence onto the brain.

The third motive behind transhumanism is global warming and its consequences. Once excessive exploitation has made the planet uninhabitable, it will no longer be able to serve as a habitat for humans; a human exodus toward other planets is going to become inevitable. The enhancement of man’s abilities will become a means of survival, for these exiles will have to adapt to extreme living conditions and a climate far more hostile than Earth’s. This is the inspiration behind the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid imagined by John Bernal,²⁷ and it is a recurrent fantasy in many contemporary science-fiction works, including those of Isaac Azimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. The American billionaire Elon Musk founded his space agency SpaceX to research the possibility of this space exodus and donated 6 billion dollars in funding just for the project of colonizing Mars.

Our analysis of this genealogy leads us to the following conclusion: “behind the transhuman, there is so much human!” Behind the refined mask of transhumanism hides the flesh-and-blood heart of a humanity that is still a prisoner of its same old illusions, its tendency to excess that the Greeks knew so well—its famous “hubris,” its immemorial fear of a fate it cannot control and its desire to become like gods through technology, at the risk of burning its wings like Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Endnotes

¹ The Transhumanist Declaration, article 1, 2002, cf. https://uutampa.org/uuhumanist/shaagdata/history/08xxxx_transhumanist.pdf

² Ibidem, art. 4.

³ Nick Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought” in Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 14, issue I, April 2005.

⁴ Nick Bostrom, born Niklas Boström on March 10, 1973, is a Swedish philosopher known for his work on the impact of futuristic technologies. He regularly voices his position on subjects such as transhumanism, cloning, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology. He is the founder of the aforementioned World Transhumanist Association.

⁵ Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Chicago: Gateway Editions); R. Posner, Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

⁶ Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, translated by R. L. Ellis and J. Spedding, in J. Robertson, ed., The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (London: Routledge, 1905).

⁷ Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, known as Condorcet (1743–1794) was a French mathematician, philosopher, politician and publisher; he is famous for his pioneering work on statistics and probabilities, as well as for his philosophical works and political action both before and after the Revolution. During his time on the bench with the Girondins, he proposed a refoundation of the educational system and of penal law.

⁸ Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press).

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ What we are presenting here is the origin of species explained from the angle of natural selection. Charles Darwin’s book also discusses human and sexual selection, and therefore cannot be reduced exclusively to this summary.

¹¹ Max More, born in January 1964, is an English philosopher whose specialty is transhumanism. Born Max O’Connor, his name was legally changed in 1990. He chose the name Max More, in the sense of “enhanced,” in light of his transhumanist ideas. He married Natasha Vita-More, another influential transhumanist, in 1996. The couple collaborates closely in transhumanist research and the search for a way of making life longer. Max More is the founder of the Extropy Institute and has written many articles on the philosophy of transhumanism. He introduced the modern meaning of the term “transhumanism” in a 1990 essay entitled Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy.

¹² Max More, “The Philosophy of Transhumanism,” article published on the Humanity+ website, https://www.humanityplus.org/philsophy-of-transhumanism.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Julian Sorrel Huxley (1887–1975), geneticist, was the first general director of UNESCO and one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund. He was the brother of the author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).

¹⁵ Jean Coutrot (1895-1975) was a French engineer, a pioneer in the organization of labor and minister of the economy under the Front Populaire. See the article by Cyrille Dounot, “Les Origines du Transhumanisme” in Y. Flour, P.-L. Boyer (dir.), Transhumanisme : questions éthiques et enjeux juridiques, Paris, 2020.

¹⁶ Julian Huxley, Evolution. The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942), p. 575.

¹⁷ Julian Huxley, The Human Crisis, Washington, 1963, p. 87.

¹⁸ Acronyms for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.

¹⁹ Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.

²⁰ Robert Wilson Chester Ettinger (1918–2011) is an American scholar known as the “father of cryonics” because of the impact of his book The Perspective of Immortality in 1962. In 1972, he contributed to the conceptualization of transhumanism in his book Man into Superman, which made him a pioneer of the movement. In 1976, he founded the Cryonics Institute and the related institution the Immortalist Society, for which he served as president until 2003. His body was cryopreserved, as were those of his first and second wives.

²¹ FM-2030, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (1930-2000), was an author, professor and consultant, and an important figure of transhumanism. He changed his name to FM-2030, in a shout-out to the hope and conviction he had of celebrating his hundredth birthday in the year 2030.

²² Gordon Earle Moore (1929–2011) was a PhD chemist, physicist and American business owner. In 1968, he cofounded with Robert Noyce and Andrew Grove the company Intel, the first global manufacturer of microprocessors. He is known for having published an empirical law named after him, Moore’s law, published on April 19, 1965, in the journal Electronics. This law is the formulation of an observation: the information-storing capacities and calculation speed of processors progress exponentially each year.

²³ “By the 2030’s, thanks to the hybridization of our brains with electronic nanocomponents, we are going to enjoy a demiurgic power” (Ray Kurzweil).

²⁴ The expression is from Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading and the first human ever to get a microchip implant.

²⁵ Cf. the performances of ChatGPT by OpenAI, that has been available for free online since November 2022.

²⁶ Cited by Luc Ferry, La Révolution Transhumaniste, éditions J’ai Lu, 2018, p. 62.

²⁷ John Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, London, 1929.

TITLE IMAGE: The Fall of Icarus, anon. after Peter Paul Rubens.