Our Post-Human Present
We're all posthuman now.
Years ago, I used to read a lot of chin-stroking “think pieces” in places like First Things about our “post-human” future, but I don’t see these much anymore. You also don’t hear about “secular humanism” much anymore either. Ever wonder why? It is hard to notice cultural silences at first; something you used to hear about or read about all the time ceases to be current, and it takes time for you to register this. For me, these two things that have seemingly slipped from consciousness are highly significant; they announce the fact that a posthuman world is now upon us.
Certain thinkers have predicted this for sometime now. Most famously, the pedophile Michel Foucault wrote in the conclusion of his The Order of Things (1966) that “Man” was construct of a certain type of epistemology, one that came with a shelf life:
“One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
Some have pointed out that Monsieur Pedo wasn’t talking about homo sapiens sapiens but only '“the Human” as it has existed culturally since the Renaissance. But this seems a bit too clever by half. Foucault’s anti-humanist stance indicts Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism, and by extension, Christianity, since the focus of its worship is a God made human. And it would be impossible, I think, to separate these from “humanity” as a biological species at this point.
What the disappearance of those think pieces indicate is that we are waking up to the realization that our age is already posthuman. The obsession with UFOs, AI, the non-human, trans-humanism, are all indicators of this. This explains the disappearance of “secular humanism” as well. If you do a quick Google search, you can still find secular humanist organizations out there of course. The institutions still exist, but all of the cultural energy is on the side of transhumanists like the Israeli faggot, Yuval Harari, who has managed to repackage the “God is Dead” meme for the TikTok Age (and is it a coincidence that so many of these people are homosexuals?) Defending “the human” is no longer the obvious, default position among elites in progressive, technologically advanced societies. That’s why all the secular humanists are on the back of milk cartons these days.
I don’t know if it is a sign of late stage decadence, but the desire to transcend our humanity is some regards is so obvious as to no longer seem novel. If the ubiquity of access to abortion were not enough, the current mania for legalizing euthanasia seems to have awakened some to this realization. The banal horrors of Canada’s MAID program or the current push to legalize euthanasia in the U.K. are terrible, but doctors in Europe have been euthanizing healthy children as young as 12 years old since the early 2000s. Social media has made people aware of this but we have been living this way for decades now. The “human” as such has not been sacred to Western Civilization for a quite a long time.
Even so, many people don’t recognize the monumental nature of this shift, because they have lived in a Christian society too long and forgotten its nature. Christianity is THE anthropocentric religion par excellence, something Nietzsche well understood. The ancient religions of Greece and Rome worshiped nature along side the gods, Egyptians and Hindus worship particular animals, and most worshipped a variety of angels, demons, and spirits alongside human-like gods. As the historian of Late Antiquity Peter Brown noted, Christianity, while retaining a belief in spirits, angels and demons, made human relationships the focal point of its worship in a way no other religion could have, and this represented a revolution in religious belief.
Having marinated for so long in a civilization where anything but Christian faith was unthinkable, for the past few centuries even those who wished to negate Christianity’s influence could not imagine anything but a civilization with humanity as its heart. But with the demise of that last gasp of secular humanism—the “New Atheists” of yore—comes the inevitable afterbirth: the de-centering and de-throning of the human.
This doesn’t mean we all going to become mass murderers; it just means that our cultural imagination has been definitively reshaped, in ways we can hardly understand, and whose consequences were are just beginning to conceive. You may yourself be Christian, or a Deist, or some sort of secular humanist, but you will have to do so from now on in defiance of the powers of the world, of all the routines, thought processes and habits that shape a society, in the teeth of its overwhelming influence. We’re all posthuman now, whether we like it or not.