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.