Originally published at crisis magazine
With the first successful implementation of Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface, Neuralink, at the beginning of the year, perhaps we will one day consider that the era of transhumanism was officially begun in 2024. What is transhumanism, though? It is a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to science. It’s not just an ideology either. Nor is it a philosophy or even (only) a hidden secular religion. Transhumanism is all that and more—it is the spirit that pervades numerous phenomena of our time. As I will try to demonstrate, that spirit is anti-Christian.
Let’s start with the etymology. One of the paradoxes of our era is that we define ourselves less by nouns—let’s leave pronouns aside for now—and more by their prefixes. A decade or two ago, the prefix post was dominant; in the last ten years, it was replaced by the prefix trans. Post meant recognizing the fact that, as a civilization, we are no longer what we once were; instead, we are now postmodern, post-Christian, post-metaphysics, post-secular, post-truth, and so on. Trans, however, could be interpreted as an attempt to actively manage what we will become. In transhumanism, humanism is less important than trans because it is not the foundation
