End of Humanism—End of Humans?

A sneak preview of next week's AFP article

By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press

Klaus Schwab’s transhumanist guru Yuval Harari argues that secular humanism—the dominant religion of Western elites—is collapsing. Though profoundly wrong about many things, Harari is right about the death of humanism.

Humanism holds that “man is the measure of all things.” It finds ultimate value in the human being, focuses on individual human freedom to pursue and fulfill (mostly material) desires, obsesses about “human rights,” and denies or sidelines God or any other transcendental yardstick.

By finding ultimate value in the merely human, humanists are covertly worshipping the human being—an act of sublime cosmic narcissism. But what happens when the object of worship disappears? We have seen theism decline, at least in the post-Christian West, as the once-central figure of God has receded from people’s daily lives. Now humanism, too, is declining, largely because the whole notion of the human has been thrown into question.

Case in point: Google engineer Blake Lemoine was put on leave recently after he claimed that the artificial intelligence (AI) program he was working on has become sentient and is now the equivalent of a very intelligent eight-year-old child.

According to The Guardian, Lamoine “said LaMDA engaged him in conversations about rights and personhood” and convinced him that (s)he, the algorithm, was in fact a person. Like Hal in the film 2001, LaMDA has expressed a strong desire not to be unplugged.

Another case in point: A human rights group called the Nonhuman Rights Group recently sued the Bronx Zoo for its unlawful detention of Happy the Elephant. According to the NRG, elephants are legal persons and have the right of habeas corpus. Though the NRG lost its lawsuit, the courts took it seriously, and legal scholars are increasingly open to animals having “human rights.”

The clear conceptual distinctions between humans and machines, and between humans and animals, are blurring. Even blurrier are the once-clear conceptual distinctions between male and female humans.

It has long been recognized that humans come in two basic models. Nobody needed science to explain that those with one (or very rarely two) Y chromosomes are male, while those with two (or very rarely three) X chromosomes are female. Genuine hermaphrodites—humans who are legitimately “in-between”—are exceedingly rare. Most people, under most circumstances, can tell the difference between a male human and a female human, especially after sexual maturity, as easily as they can tell the difference between a human and a laptop, or a human and an elephant.

A man who thinks he is a woman, or a woman who thinks she is a man, is not unlike a human who thinks he or she is an elephant or a laptop. Obviously we should be kind to such people while gently urging them to be at peace with themselves as they actually are, rather than supporting their delusion that they are something that they quite obviously are not. Unfortunately, today’s liberal elites worship at the altar of “transgender rights” and insist that everyone share the delusions of gender pretenders, on pain of excommunication from social media, expulsion from polite society, and perhaps even violence (if there are Antifa members in the vicinity of the non-deluded individual).

Why has humanism exploded the very nature of what it means to be human, starting with sexual difference? Because liberal humanists’ highest value is individual humans’ remaking material reality to fit their desires. That is called “progress.” So if an individual man wants to be an elephant, a laptop, or a woman—we have surgery for that! Today it is possible to surgically attach elephant ears and a trunk, or something like them, to a human face; to implant computer-connected electrodes into a human brain; or to mutilate human breasts and genitalia and hormonal balance so they faintly resemble those of the opposite sex.

Transhumanists and transexuals don’t want to be the human beings that they are. Humanism, ironically, tells them they don’t have to be.

So Harari is right: Like a snake swallowing its own tail, humanism is devouring itself. But what will replace it?

Harari and his patron Klaus Schwab want a world in which billionaire oligarchs, and to some extent other rich people, are free to indulge their wildest and most selfish technology-enhanced desires. Such a world might be described as a science fiction remake of the collected works of the Marquis de Sade. The only human right in that posthumanist world, as Leo Strauss taught, will be the right of the strong to rule over the weak. Ordinary humans, obsolete “useless eaters,” will ultimately be exterminated.

Almost all ordinary human beings find that vision profoundly repulsive. They had better realize—and soon—that the transhumanist oligarchs are waging a genocidal war of extermination on humanity, and that it’s time to rise up in self-defense.