There is a lot to admire about Elon Musk. The eccentric billionaire who immigrated from South Africa became the world’s richest man through a nearly unquenchable thirst for innovation and exploration. And he has now taken up the cause of leading President Donald Trump’s project to rid the federal government of waste and fraud.

In many ways, Musk is the most visible embodiment of the spirit of adventurism that inspired generations of Americans to strike out on their own and build lives in uncharted and often dangerous places. Such is the promise of SpaceX, the company that he founded with the expressed goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the planet Mars. The company was created with the expressed purpose of furthering American adventurism into the final frontier.

But as with most explorers and innovators, Musk carries with him a set of ideals and goals that, to say the least, are morally and ethically complex. 

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He excitedly calls for the colonization of Mars to ensure that humanity becomes a multi-planetary species, and he frets about the declining birth rate. But as he continues to sire children from more and more women, he has little to say about the decline of marriage. Moreover, ethical scruples are practically nonexistent as he works to expand his technological advancements on Earth with the goal of expanding humanity’s reliance on automation and artificial intelligence.

Now, I won’t pretend to know exactly what is in Musk’s heart. But taken in its entirety, the Muskian project of technological advancement vis-a-vis humanity is a transhumanist one. That is, an endeavor that seeks to master human capabilities and human biology in a godlike fashion through the advancement of technology. And it is an ideology that is inseparable from Silicon Valley and the technological revolution it has brought to the 21st century.

The return of Trump to the White House has provided Silicon Valley with the political cover to effectively return to its ideological roots. In political terms, Musk and his ideological ilk are libertarians at heart but with a twist: rather than adopt an exclusively live-and-let-live mentality, these technological innovators view their efforts as necessary for human beings to attain a perfect life.

The danger of this way of thinking is that this philosophy is as much a religious and spiritual ideology as it is a scientific ideology. It requires a belief that human beings are capable of creating a perfect or utopian way of life and, in doing so, mirrors the utopian dream of communism.

Instead of a plan to achieve utopian bliss through the even distribution of capital, transhumanism promises a utopia built on science and technology, a utopia where capital creates the utopia.

Neuralink, one of Musk’s many initiatives, is the technological embodiment of the utopia promised by this transhumanist ideology. In theory, Neuralink is a brain implant that is supposed to provide functionality to individuals who have lost mobility in their limbs. Thus, a person who suffers from paralysis would be able to control a cellphone or computer simply by thinking. As a medical feat, the success of this technology could help an entire group of people achieve a new and better way of life. But placed in a broader context, it could also lead to an even greater reliance on technology for anyone seeking an easy way to go through life, to say nothing of the health risks that could be involved with implanting a computer chip in one’s brain.

One may hear this and wonder: Why is that of concern? The people who want such things will get them, and those who do not, will not. But with Musk enmeshed in the operations of the federal government, there is a real risk that the false promise of a utopia delivered by technology may ultimately find its way into government policy.

To believe that technology can bring about humanity’s mastery of nature itself requires a belief that human beings have no higher purpose in life. It severs human beings from a responsibility to a Creator God and is thus incompatible with the Christian moral ethos that defined and built Western civilization since the baptism of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. 

Without the moral ethos of Christianity, namely that human beings are created by God and for God, a principle upon which the United States was founded, human beings become a civilizational commodity. And nowhere is this more abundantly clear than in Musk’s obsession with the declining fertility rate.

It should be first stated that Musk is fundamentally correct that the declining fertility rate across the globe is a problem. Except that for him, the cure for this diagnosis is entirely analytical and devoid of moral considerations.

A holistic and moral perspective on the declining birth rate would include a concern about the decline in stable families, a major contributor to the declining fertility rate. But by reducing the issue to simply an analytical one, Musk has identified the problem to be exclusively limited to fewer births, which means the logical solution is simply more births.

And there is no question that Musk has helped increase the number of births. Publicly, he is known to have fathered more than a dozen children by multiple women. He has been married twice, but the mothers of his children include his ex-girlfriend Grimes and Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink employee whose children were conceived via in vitro fertilization. Most recently, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair announced that she had given birth to a child and that Musk was the father. She is now publicly accusing Musk of having abandoned her and the child, even as she lives in a Texas apartment provided to her by Musk. It should be noted that the billionaire has yet to acknowledge that St. Clair’s child is his.

Regardless, the trail of incomplete families left in the wake of Musk’s attempt to raise the fertility rate is a testament to the analytical thinking that dominates Silicon Valley and its transhumanist ethos. He identified a real problem, but rather than see a larger, more spiritual picture, he focused only on the immediate and most efficient way to solve it. The cure to low fertility is not simply more babies. Rather, it is more stable, loving families. After all, the head cannot be separated from the heart, lest the head dies.

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I often think about the 2008 Disney Pixar film Wall-E, which was trashed as an environmentalist project. But I think the film is one of few stories ever told that fully captures the perils of technology and a purely analytical view of humanity. Every human being in the film lives a life of luxury aboard a never-ending journey on a space cruiser. They all move around in motorized recliners and have become so overweight and stationary over centuries that the entire world they know is contained within that single recliner. And it ultimately takes a small little rogue robot to remind the people of what it means to be a human.

For all his faults, Musk is still providing the Trump administration with a much-needed service in his efforts to root out waste and fraud across the federal government. But the influence of the world’s richest man must stop there. The government cannot sanction innovation for innovation’s sake, nor can it embrace an ideology that sees human beings as purely material beings. If it does, the day may come when it takes a robot to remind us what it means to be human again.