Far from being a fringe cult of deranged Silicon Valley tech bros implanting microchips in their brains (though this exists), transhumanism takes on many forms and has rapidly spread throughout the post-Christian West to become its main religion. As Grayson Quay lays out in his new book The Transhumanist Temptation: How Technology and Ideology Are Reshaping Humanity, this new kind of postmodern do-it-yourself metaphysics is even influencing people who should be opposed to it.

Throughout his book, Quay makes a compelling case that, consciously or unconsciously, nearly all people today, including professed Christians, have accepted most of the underlying assumptions of transhumanism. In each domain of modern thought — the human body, reality, politics, work, and God — man has effectively made himself the measure and master of all things and become less human as a result.

The great irony is that the philosophers who ushered in contemporary transhumanism label themselves humanists. Quay begins his inquiry reflecting on these luminaries who rose to prominence in the Enlightenment. Specifically, he references the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who separated human nature from human morality, declaring that “observations about the kinds of creatures we are cannot lead to insight about how we ought to live.” This then leads to Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century, who equates the metaphorical death of God with a new kind of freedom: “Not free in the sense of being unencumbered in the pursuit of our proper ends, but free in the sense of being able to choose those ends.”

These ideas are then formalized into the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who dismisses any definition of human nature besides “the being that defines itself.” Self-definition thus becomes man’s defining purpose. This in turn sets a foundation for a relativist ethics that vaunts personal freedom and autonomy above all other moral values. In Quay’s estimation, the ideological offspring of these thinkers is today’s transhumanist ideologies.

Absolute Freedom?

Quay begins his exploration of such ideologies with its most obvious manifestation: the quest to enhance the human body to better meet the demands of self-definition and personal autonomy. Before delving into instances of individuals directly modifying their bodies to suit their preferred gender, he cites the introduction of the birth control pill as the first instance of modern bodily transhumanism since “the transhumanist is obsessed with controlling her own body and is willing to sacrifice anything, even her happiness, to maintain that control.”

This divorce of sex and reproduction then sets a precedent for other modes of transhumanist objectification of the body such as transgender surgeries, genetic manipulation, artificial life-extension procedures, and assisted suicide. When it comes to the body, people today will treat it as if it is a material possession like any other.

Or, due to the rapid advancements in digital technology, many transhumanists can simply escape their bodies altogether by living in cyberspace. Already, the smartphone enables people to spend the majority of their waking life online. Sometime soon, people will be able to ditch the phone and access the internet instantaneously: “the next step … is the full integration of networked virtual reality into human biology itself.” Although Elon Musk has marketed his neural implant Neuralink as a means of helping people with disabilities, it is almost certain that this will soon become a way for able-bodied users to “replace the dreary living room across [their] entire field of vision while [their] mind guides [their] avatar more deftly than [their] fingers ever could.”

The natural consequence of such a possibility calls into question the idea of having a body at all. After all, René Descartes (in some ways, the grandfather of transhumanism) asserted that man is a “thing that thinks,” never mentioning anything about a body. And if man can become a disembodied intelligence, what does that make of artificial intelligence? Quay believes this puts human beings and their newest piece of software on the same existential plane, making full virtual relationships between them inevitable: “For transhumanists, the idea of falling in love with a digital construct represents a triumph of their view of personhood.” Sadly, current trends confirm this dubious triumph as interactions with AI chatbots, even those of an intimate nature, continue to become ever more popular.

In his next section, Quay considers the implications of transhumanism on the American political system. Citing the writings of post-liberal thinkers like Patrick Deneen, Quay casts the modern liberal democracy as inherently transhumanist: “The ideal that emerges from liberal ideology is that of the perfectly free individual making perfectly free choices.” Unbridled by natural law and Christian morality, liberalism blends seamlessly with transhumanism, committed to the effort of erasing all boundaries, definitions, and potential limits to absolute freedom and autonomy.

This makes Quay’s prognosis for the Western political order excessively pessimistic. In his view, America and the rest of the West will ultimately degenerate into transhumanist authoritarian regimes that paradoxically enslave citizens in the name of freedom. And people will accept transhumanist totalitarianism since it promises to resolve every conflict and every limitation: “Barring a violent revolution (which has no one to carry it out) and the creation of an authoritarian regime (which has almost no one to staff it), the best an anti-transhumanist postliberal can hope for is small victories.”

Needless to say, this is small comfort to the many conservatives involved in reforming government policies and staying true to the nation’s founding principles. It is also not realistic. Even if liberal ideals have become corrupted and subverted in certain parts of the West, this does not guarantee that every nation will descend into a transhumanist police state where everyone must conform to a centralized system and abandon the institutions and practices that give their life meaning.

Perhaps the best fit for transhumanist ideology is the economy, which naturally incentivizes workers to refashion themselves to maximize material gain. Because today’s economy is geared toward efficiency, productivity, and standardization, the usual meaning and fulfillment that comes from working a trade or profession has been erased for the sake of ever greater profits. Ideally, all human labor will be automated and outsourced to computers while human beings are sustained with some form of universal basic income (UBI).

While transhumanists like Marc Andreessen would argue that this kind of progress will liberate human beings to focus on the work of self-invention and doing what makes them happy, the likely outcome of such an arrangement would be exploitative addiction without interruption. Or as Quay describes it, “big business hacks your dopamine receptors to get you hooked on their products, and since big business has all the lobbying money, government won’t step in to protect you.” Once again, this already exists in some form in the developed world and will only worsen if no one opposes it.

For his part, Quay advocates for a “humane economy,” which “would prioritize keeping people out of poverty through dignified and productive work, making it possible to support a family on a single working-class income, directing resources towards innovation and investment that actually improve people’s lives, supporting ‘left-behind’ cities and regions, and respecting workers’ dignity.” This is a nice thought, but Quay says little in the way of policy prescriptions or achievable benchmarks to achieve this. Rather, his pessimism comes up again, and he concludes that the majority of Americans have not supported this vision and are doomed to a transhumanist economy.

In Search of Solutions

Finally, Quay discusses transhumanism’s impact on the very institution that is supposed to combat it: the Church. Beyond giving rise to alternative pseudo-religions that preach transcendence and autonomy without God, transhumanists have infiltrated Christian churches, substituting the Gospel’s call to virtue and sacrifice with indiscriminate empathy and personal utility. This has the effect of turning Christianity into a social justice organization or a place for glorified emotional therapy rather than an institution founded by God.

Then there is the problem of removing the bodily element from Christianity. In the wake of Covid and online church services, many churches lost adherents as well as much of their raison d’être of celebrating God’s Incarnation. On the other hand, the Catholic Church has made the Holy Eucharist the center of worship, but it still adopts transhumanist sensibilities by becoming overly dependent on online resources and influencers for evangelization and catechesis.

Those hoping for some practical solutions at the end of this analysis will be sadly disappointed. After surveying the state of society and its turn to transhumanism, Quay decides that humanity’s best bet is attempting to become a spacefaring civilization. The next option would be a kind of libertarian decentralized society with the people voluntarily living in self-contained communities that have their own traditions and values. This whole chapter of what is possible, while fascinating, does not inspire confidence in what can be done to stop or reverse the tide of transhumanism.

That said, whether the reader agrees with Quay’s final assessment, it is undeniable that his whole argument up to this point speaks to a great problem that most people struggle with understanding, let alone recognizing. Even though he occasionally overreaches by seeing transhumanism in everything and becomes carried away with its potential dangers to society, he successfully articulates a pervasive worldview that demands an active response from anyone who cares about human flourishing.

And in Quay’s defense, tackling the innumerable examples of transhumanism is an ambitious undertaking that he successfully manages in relatively few pages. As such, The Transhumanist Temptation should serve as a springboard for more specific and in-depth critiques of transhumanism in today’s culture.

At the very least, the book sheds light on what becomes of those who leave the Christian faith and abandon tradition and give in to the devil’s promise to become like gods. One way or another, they will lose their humanity along with all the wonderful blessings that make life worth living.