The title of this post refers to the title of an essay that I excerpt from below, by David Souto Alcade.
How Postmodernism Became Transhumanism
This article is so dense that I almost gave up reading it. However, I was able to absorb some incredible nuggets. Just another amazing contribution from Brownstone Institute, which runs the monthly Supper Club that I attend here in Bloomington, grateful to be among free thinkers for an evening.
It begins:
Nothing inspires more dread in our post-human world than the gaze of a child. The ethical renewal of society has always depended on the disruptive, disturbing, and unbreakable innocence of childhood.
The supreme joy of having children, the existential thrill of raising them, the human dignity bestowed upon us by the always undeserved and unwavering love of a child—in short, each and every one of the most self-evident anthropological certainties are on their way to becoming catacomb truths, as unutterable as they are hurtful.
Increasingly large segments of the population, who our supposedly enlightened West has culturally—if not physically—sterilized, and persuaded to replace their nonexistent offspring with equally sterilized pets, are unable to understand how anyone could want to have children instead of remaining eternally in adolescent mode in order to engage “self-actualization.”
This next excerpt reminds me of what’s threatening my own neighborhood of small homes, and of some young city council members who want exactly what’s described here for Bloomington.
Let’s also address what’s going on in our cities, where neighborhood communities are being replaced by an amalgam of nomadic, uprooted existences made up of what Juan Irigoyen has called “habitationists“—thatis, eternally childless Western youth who despise children and the elderly and, content to live crammed into apartments converted into hives and with their laptops perpetually attuned to Netflix, “are leading the new gentrification” by displacing the long-resident families from their homes. Without offspring (prole) to defend (without the possibility of transforming themselves even into proletarians), these individuals seem resigned to the inhuman mandate of the system and offering their lives up as a sacrifice.
They may think they don’t have a major problem, but in fact they do. The West has today become a demonic culture that, through behavioral control, keeps its population deluded under the false narrative that, with the gods supposedly overthrown and religions defunct, we humans must deify ourselves.
Returning to the original insight:
There is nothing, therefore, that causes as much dread in our posthuman West as the gaze of a child. The ethical renewal of society has always depended, generation after generation, on the disturbing, inevitable, and disruptive innocence of children. A few years after leaving adolescence behind, just when we believe humanity is cruel and disillusionment begins to seep into our guts, we become parents, and children once again infect us with innocence.
When our children cease to be children and we lose direct contact with innocence, the thrum of hatred threatens to return to us until we become grandparents and childhood once again purifies us. Children are the foundation of ethics, the indispensable bond for human life. How can we remain human in a West that is not guarded by the eyes of children? What tragic future awaits us, stripped of their innocence?
Much more here on the Enlightenment as the historical basis of the disintegration of family and community. Near the end, this:
The Enlightenment is a negative religion in the sense that, rather than reconnecting or reuniting human beings on the basis of an ethical community, it separates them from others until they are atomized. It demands that the truly “enlightened” citizen renounce their anthropological legacy in an increasingly exaggerated and violent manner. Hence, the enlightened woke deconstructive frenzy of casting tradition into the bonfire.
The enlightened individual always pretends to know one thing more than the devil (that is, to be a god), when in reality he is a poor devil who obeys a reactionary, plebo-phobic and falsely universal doctrine that arose to put an end to the early modern revolutions, and that has ended up turning scientism into the opium of the people, and transforming us all into adolescent orphans, without any basis in tradition, who, bereft, must submit to technocracy.
It is only through recognizing how we have been forced to renounce everything we truly are that we explain why so many have been persuaded that having children (the absolute pinnacle of individual and collective life) is madness, when, in fact, the real madness is not having them while acting out as rootless dandies.
Meanwhile, personally: two amazing conversations from yesterday and this morning: the first with a 67-year-old academic philosopher whom I have known for many years (she started reading my blog), but whom I have never met in person until now, when she came to speak at an IU conference! The ease and fertility of our communication left me breathless, and as I prepared for bed I found myself hungering for more.
More came in the early morning, when I took my daily walk with a 47 year old neighbor with husband and two children who is in the middle of an utterly cataclysmic and totally exciting life transition. Her shuddering realizations are totally satisfying to one such as me who always hungers for growth, i.e., expansion and integration, following initial confusion — that follows organic laws.
As I used to say to my students when a graduate student in philosophy at Boston University:
“I much prefer a fertile confusion to a sterile clarity.”
So very different are these deeply personal communications — between conscious women as we blindly and yet intuitively navigate today’s terrifically choppy waters – from the robotic technocratic state that only seems to be inevitable.
Hold on to your hearts, folks; don’t let the left-brainers who yearn to be turned into bots overwhelm your common sense: your, and my, and OUR sensing in common.
As long as we are, or return and remain, truly human with one another, in person, the technocrats will NOT win.
