Aug. 26, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:00
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unidentified
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This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | |
| Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
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unidentified
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And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | |
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. Good evening. | ||
| I'm Joe Allen, sitting in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| And with me tonight is Grayson Kway, author of the new book, The Transhumanist Temptation. | ||
| How technology and ideology are reshaping humanity and how to resist it. | ||
| Grayson, I really appreciate you coming on. | ||
| And we look forward to hearing a little bit more about your perspective on transhumanism, Christianity, and who knows, maybe crass jokes in the vein of BAP. | ||
| Let's see what you got for us. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you for having me on. | |
| I'm looking forward to covering all of it. | ||
| Well, first off, Grayson, I just want to get an idea. | ||
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unidentified
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Now, I have read quite a bit of this book. | |
| It's excellent. | ||
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unidentified
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And I understand your central argument really against transhumanism is not from the basis of humanism, but rather from the basis of a deeply Christian or spiritual perspective. | |
| Can you just let the audience in on your thesis and tell us what's the central thrust of the book? | ||
| Yeah, so the title's The Transhumanist Temptation. | ||
| My original working title was actually The Serpent's Promise. | ||
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unidentified
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I wanted to get transhumanism into the title. | |
| That's nice and subtle, but you know how publishers are. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, you got to get that SEO, right? | |
| But yeah, my central thesis is that I don't think that transhumanism is necessarily this weird new science fiction fringe thing, which, you know, a lot of people view it that way and it causes them to, I think, write it off and to really not be fully aware of the threat that it poses. | ||
| My thesis is that the transhumanist temptation goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, that it's the serpent's promise, you shall be as gods, and specifically that you can be like God apart from a relationship with God, apart from a relationship to your creator, and that you can find ways to transcend your humanity in this way. | ||
| And yeah, that, you know, so that mindset, once that's in place, all you're really doing is waiting for the technological means to put it into effect. | ||
| And today, those are arriving very, very rapidly, more quickly than many of us can even keep track of. | ||
| Yeah, you would maybe argue that transhumanism in general comes from an atheistic or at least a naturalistic perspective, that human beings are responsible for our own lot here on earth. | ||
| Would you agree with that? | ||
| Yeah, so I think that the opposite of transhumanism in many ways is an idea of natural law, of the idea that here's what human nature is. | ||
| Here's the kind of beings that we are, and that we can actually extrapolate things about how we should live, what the good life for humans looks like from the kind of beings that we are, you know, as rational animals, but also as embodied beings. | ||
| Eudaimonia. | ||
| You really emphasize that concept from Aristotle. | ||
| Yeah, it's a Cyrusitelian idea. | ||
| You know, it carries forward into St. Thomas Aquinas. | ||
| It's also present in the Hebrew scriptures. | ||
| You have this idea of wisdom or chokmah. | ||
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And I'm probably not phlemming that enough, but yeah, I kind of really lean into it. | |
| But yeah, this idea shows up in Proverbs too, right? | ||
| The chochma is used as wisdom, but it's also used as kind of like skill or craft to describe the people who are helping to build the tabernacle in Exodus, for example. | ||
| So the fact that that's the same word suggests that there's an art or a craft to living well as a human, that this is what wisdom is. | ||
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It's following the path of flourishing that's been laid out for us by the God who created us as the kind of beings that we are. | |
| And I think that, yeah, transhumanism takes this, requires this naturalistic worldview in many ways because once you've really leaned into kind of a Darwinist view of human evolution, that everything is just flux, it's just guided by blind physical forces, well, then suddenly there is no ought attached to the is. | ||
| We can't discern anything about what the good life looks like for humans or how we ought to live from the kind of beings that we are, because the kind of beings that we are is a complete accident. | ||
| So you end up with a view that defines human flourishing in terms of this radical freedom to define yourself, this kind of existentialist freedom that like Jean-Paul Sartre would talk about, where your existence precedes your essence. | ||
| The meaning of life is just to give life meaning. | ||
| You have to decide what it means to be a good human. | ||
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You have to decide what it means to be a human in general. | |
| And once you've accepted that, you've basically thrown out the idea of humanity, of the human person as a union of body and soul, and you've substituted this deification of the individual will, which is now why we have a medical system in this country where the purpose of medicine used to be guided by a sense of teleology, by a sense that we know what human nature is. | ||
| We know what a flourishing human looks like by this definition of human nature, and the purpose of medicine is to restore you to that flourishing. | ||
| Now the purpose is to cater to the individual's will and the individual's desires. | ||
| To someone like Hippocrates or anyone rooted in this natural law tradition, it would be madness to suggest that I could go to the doctor and say, I would like you to cut off my genitals, or I would like you to give me hormones to make me more like a woman. | ||
| This would be an insane idea because they would say, no, you're a man. | ||
| If something is wrong with your genitals, not that there is anything. | ||
| I don't want to imply that to the audience. | ||
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unidentified
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But if something's wrong with your body or in any way, we can restore you to flourishing. | |
| What we're not going to do is take a part of you that's healthy and cut it off or take a normal, healthy bodily function and disrupt it in some way in order to cater to your desires. | ||
| And that's what so much of medicine is now from birth control and abortion to transgenderism. | ||
| You're friends with Mary Harrington. | ||
| I know her a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, we haven't met in person, but we've interacted. | ||
| I don't agree with her philosophical standpoint on this phrase, but I absolutely love the phrase from her book, Feminism Against Progress, meet Lego Gnosticism to transcend one's physical body by cutting it apart and rearranging it like a sort of physiological Mr. Potato head. | ||
| Without going into the Gnostic question, maybe a bit later in the conversation, I would like to hit on the religious perspective that you came from when writing this book. | ||
| It's very clear that you're critiquing from a Christian perspective and also, as you've told me, a Catholic perspective to an extent. | ||
| Can you tell us how did you come about writing this book and a little bit more about the spiritual grounding that you yourself are coming from? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, so the way I came to write this book, I started freelance writing back in 2016, so it's been almost 10 years now, goodness. | |
| But I never really established a clear beat for myself, or at least I didn't think I had. | ||
| I had all these different kind of very disparate interests. | ||
| You know, over here, I was really interested in bioethical issues. | ||
| So I was writing about abortion and surrogacy and artificial wombs and all these other things. | ||
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unidentified
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I was interested in technology and kind of virtual reality, augmented reality, the movement toward that, AI, different things like that. | |
| I got really interested. | ||
| Did you try the good stuff? | ||
| Virtual reality? | ||
| Have you taken a trip on the good stuff? | ||
| What's it? | ||
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unidentified
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HTC displays and very vivid. | |
| Yeah, I've done kind of demos with things like that. | ||
| It's certainly interesting and it's kind of fun to do as a toy. | ||
| But please go on. | ||
| Yeah, no, I was. | ||
| So then, you know, I was interested in kind of the post-liberal critique of our political system that asks, you know, do we, have we gotten to a point where we don't acknowledge any higher good for humanity other than what each individual chooses for themselves? | ||
| And could it be possible to orient a politics around some shared ideal of human flourishing that's deeper than that? | ||
| I got really interested in kind of new right economics and the economic nationalist side. | ||
| Like, can we build an economy that's not just line go up, but that serves some, again, some ideal of human flourishing that isn't just maximum consumption and maximum choice. | ||
| And then on the religious side, as you mentioned, I got really interested in these questions of re-enchantment and spiritual warfare, the kind of stuff that Jonathan Peigot was doing. | ||
| And then suddenly I had kind of an epiphany where I realized the thread connecting all of this was transhumanism. | ||
| And from that insight kind of came this book. | ||
| Tell me this. | ||
| From a family man perspective, what is your ideal for human flourishing? | ||
| Well, I think there are certain human goods that you can deduce from human nature. | ||
| You know, part of this is marriage and family, you know, freedom to not freedom to define yourself in kind of this existentialist way, but freedom to work towards your flourishing, the pursuit of happiness, which, you know, if you read the founders, they don't mean, you know, the freedom to, you know, live as a woman or to, you know, do whatever you want in this way. | ||
| They really mean you daimonia when they say happiness. | ||
| Like they all have this robust understanding of natural law, almost all do. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton gets into it a lot in his essay, Farmer Refuted, which I'd highly recommend to everyone. | ||
| It really debunks this idea that the founders were just these, you know, were uniformly just these enlightenment rationalists who were just totally de-rasinated and just wanted anything like the current regime that we have. | ||
| But yeah, that's what I would say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that, you know, there's one of the thinkers I quote in the book is John Finnis, who's this kind of modern natural law philosopher, and he goes through and identifies these human goods. | ||
| But unfortunately, we've gotten to the point where I think the only human goods we recognize are individual autonomy and GDP growth. | ||
| Yeah, I feel that. | ||
| What are some of these human goods? | ||
| And I'm not familiar with John Phineas. | ||
| Yeah, so he mentions aesthetic appreciation, marriage and family. | ||
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unidentified
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I'd have to pull up the thing to get the full list. | |
| I think he has about nine of them. | ||
| You know, there's kind of play and leisure. | ||
| You know, there's the liberty to be uninhibited in the pursuit of your flourishing as a human being. | ||
| These are all things that you can kind of deduce just from what we know ourselves to be as humans. | ||
| This isn't something like, you know, oh, we want to impose religion on people. | ||
| Like the whole point of natural law theory is that these are truths that can be known through unaided human reason, which are then, you know, confirmed by revelation because they're true of the world God created. | ||
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unidentified
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It's not that revelation is this extrinsic thing imposing obligations on you that are completely unrooted in the kind of creature that you are. | |
| That would be sort of a cruel cosmic joke if God were to have done something like that, I think. | ||
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unidentified
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And I mean, you know, there's a natural law tradition that is present in Christianity, yes, but, you know, that you can find in Aristotle, who obviously was not a Christian. | |
| Yeah, yeah, Aquinas picks it up, but there's natural law traditions within Islam and Judaism as well that I haven't read as much into, but I know they exist. | ||
| And there's, you know, some modern kind of secular natural law thinkers as well. | ||
| Yeah, I think there is a good argument that the book of nature has a lot to tell us about what it means to be human and perhaps even the telos of the human species, although opinions differ on that, right? | ||
| When you look at the fossil record, for instance, and consider the human being from the evolutionary perspective, if one reads the book of nature in that fashion, I think that's one of the justifications for this transhumanist point of view. | ||
| You see radical biological alteration from the Australopithecines through the hominids, and then a pretty radical shift beginning with everything from campfires and spears, the reduction and dentition and the gut. | ||
| And so I think transhumanism, or many, if not most, not all transhumanism. | ||
| Sorry, can I jump in on the evolutionary thing? | ||
| Yeah, so I think, yeah, there's a reason that transhumanism is often framed in kind of evolutionary terms. | ||
| Julian Huxley, who coins the term in the modern sense in which it's used in the 1950s, he's the brother of Aldous Huxley, interesting, who wrote Brave New World. | ||
| But Julian Huxley said his definition of transhumanism is that man has been appointed managing director of man's own evolution by virtue of our scientific knowledge that we now have. | ||
| We didn't ask for the job, but now we have it and we have to direct human evolution using these tools that we have. | ||
| G.K. Chesterton has an interesting response, I think, to what you brought up with the fact that we can look at the fossil record and see a track of human evolution. | ||
| Chesterton says that as a Catholic, him writing, he says, I don't object to the theory of evolution. | ||
| I think it's totally possible that God could have used the evolutionary process to produce the kind of beings he wanted to create, kind of as a means to that final end that he had in mind, which was to create humanity as the kind of beings that we are. | ||
| If you look at it that way, it doesn't pose any threat to some idea of natural law. | ||
| You can still get an ought out of the is of the kind of beings that we are. | ||
| Chesterton's fear was if you adopt kind of this Darwinist or evolutionary view as a philosophy and you just say, well, everything is flux. | ||
| You know, there's no definition of human nature because it's something that's always changing. | ||
| And the fact that it's moving more slowly than we can observe doesn't mean anything because that's just a function of how we perceive the world. | ||
| Like if you sped time up enough, you could watch humans change the way that you could, you know, I could sit on my patio and watch a flower bud open, right? | ||
| So this is what Chesterton, the argument that Chesterton makes is that if you have some view of evolution as a teleological process that produced humanity, you're sort of still on safe ground. | ||
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unidentified
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But once you adopt this view of everything as universal flux, then any idea of human nature just becomes observational or like a purely arbitrary linguistic label. | |
| And then you've fully jumped into the transhumanist realm. | ||
| It raises a lot of interesting and thorny questions. | ||
| Julian Huxley's close friend, Théard Deschardon, the I didn't know they were friends. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, he actually, chances are Julian Huxley got the term from him. | ||
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unidentified
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Deschardin had written about the progress of humanity and the scope of technological development and kind of coined the term. | |
| Actually, there was a German scientist, a geochemist, I can never remember his name, Vladimir Verdensky, I believe, something to that effect, who had coined it before. | ||
| It seems to be like the chain of custody of transhumanism, as you point out, from Dante to Verdansky, sorry, Vladimir, if I'm mispronouncing or missing your name, to Théard Deschardon, and then Julian Huxley. | ||
| And I've always found it interesting with Huxley, you know, he is taking a very scientific perspective on this. | ||
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unidentified
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He's basically an atheist, despite all of his nods to religion as a positive cultural force. | |
| And he's, and Huxley is arguing mainly from a cultural standpoint that human beings can evolve through scientific knowledge of the species. | ||
| And it doesn't really touch on technology, although obviously that grows out of it. | ||
| I think the way he stated it was that the transhuman man will be as different from our form as we are from Peking man or the Homo erectus. | ||
| Yeah, I think Julian Huxley kind of suffered from a failure of imagination. | ||
| You know, you read his essay and he talks about transhumanism, and then it's like, oh, what are we going to do with transhumanism? | ||
| And it's like, we're going to have better education and cleaner cities. | ||
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unidentified
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And it's like, okay. | |
| I describe it as cultural eugenics. | ||
| He believed in real eugenics, too, of course. | ||
| President of the British Eugenics Society. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, they go hand in hand. | |
| The thought that you should be sterilized involuntarily if you were out of work for too long. | ||
| I don't think he was so harsh, but yeah, his compatriots definitely were. | ||
| You know, the perspective of Deschardon, right? | ||
| Théard's idea of the Noah Sphere, you know, there is still that teleological element for him and a deeply Christian element, right? | ||
| I mean, obviously he was condemned for heresy, although I don't think he was excommunicated, but he was silenced by the Catholic Church because of this heterodox viewpoint that merges human evolution from a kind of creative, you know, God-willed perspective with Christian theology. | ||
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unidentified
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And so I guess what I'd say in response to there is like man's ultimate telos isn't the kind of beings you and I are today. | |
| You know, there's a parallel to you mentioned like Peking man to humanity is to human as transhuman man, the Julian Huxley thing. | ||
| There's a really close parallel actually to that statement in St. Paul where he, I think it's in 1 Corinthians, he says, you know, the way that you plant a seed and then it grows into a plant. | ||
| And from looking at the seed, you could never guess what the plant would be, what the plant would look like full grown. | ||
| He says like the adult human being you are today is to that seed as the glorified body is to that plant, right? | ||
| So the ultimate telos of humanity is not the creatures we are today. | ||
| It really is this deified, glorified state that's promised to us in the resurrection of the dead to be partakers of the divine nature, to experience theosis, right? | ||
| Deification is the Greek term, to be sons of God equal to the angels, as Christ said in one of the Gospels. | ||
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unidentified
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So that's really the ultimate telos of humanity. | |
| The thing is we're not called to bootstrap ourselves into that state through technological meetings. | ||
| And in fact, the fact that the eternal Logos becomes incarnate as a human actually makes our human nature limited and flawed as it is in the world that we're living in today. | ||
| That becomes the vehicle for our salvation. | ||
| The human nature that we share with Christ enables us to eventually come and reign with him in glory forever. | ||
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unidentified
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God became man that man might become God. | |
| So it's not, you don't deify yourself. | ||
| You don't claim this glorification or this transhuman state, if I could put it that way, by achieving it on your own apart from your creator. | ||
| That's the serpent's promise, right? | ||
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unidentified
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That's the transhumanist temptation. | |
| You achieve it actually by living and actually suffering as a human. | ||
| And that's what we can see in the saints and the martyrs and everything. | ||
| I guess that's why it becomes so thorny, because, again, I don't want to linger too much longer on Thayard's vision of the Noosphere and the Omega Point and all of this, but he is accounting for all of that, right? | ||
| It's just simply a techno-positive sort of techno-optimist Christian point of view. | ||
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unidentified
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And I think that a lot of, as you point out in the book, and correctly so, a lot of the transhumanist goals have seeped into what we would call conservatism or Christianity and other religious traditions too. | |
| So the question that becomes, and I'll pose this to you, in Teyard de Chardonn's view, technology inherently, in the same way the seed grows into an adult human, the species is growing and developing. | ||
| There's an ontogeny that is evident in the civilizational development of man into the Noosphere from the campfire to the streets to the telegraph to the internet. | ||
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unidentified
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And it would appear that there is a kind of pre-programmed, a front-loaded purpose to the technological project. | |
| Now, I'm very much on the Luddite end of the spectrum, although very much a failed Luddite. | ||
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unidentified
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But I do appreciate this notion. | |
| I'm curious, then where is the line for you? | ||
| Like, how far is too far? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, so one thing that I think is really interesting is you may have this sense in which God deems that we are kind of ready for a certain technology to come to us and that we use it wisely in order to kind of advance our human flourishing and to better serve him and glorify him and advance the common good. | |
| But you have to admit that there is also a parallel project by which demonic forces are trying to give us technologies that we are not ready for so that we can destroy ourselves with them. | ||
| I mean, this is the story of the Nephilim that you get in Genesis 6 and following, and then that's expanded upon in the book of Enoch. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I love doing the Enoch stuff. | ||
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unidentified
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But, you know, these Nephilim are demon-human hybrids that are described in Genesis 6, the sons of God mating with the daughters of men. | |
| And, you know, interesting parallels to today, we have a disembodied super intelligence that you're going to merge yourself with to create these superhuman beings. | ||
| And that bootstrapping of intelligence and power is then going to produce technologies that you can use to conquer nature and enslave your fellow man. | ||
| You know, the Nephilim are the original transhumans here in this way. | ||
| And God's response to this is that this poses such a threat to creation that I have to send the flood. | ||
| Are you familiar with Timothy Alberino's work on this? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| Yeah, he's done a lot of work. | ||
| He actually published a special edition of the Book of Enoch, and he sees it in quite literal physical terms, the Nephilim and the mating with the daughters of men. | ||
| I take a more, let's say, allegorical perspective on it, but isn't it a genocidal racist story? | ||
| Aren't these hybrids, isn't this basically like an anti-miscegenation lesson? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've never encountered a reading like that. | ||
| I would say it's not miscegenation. | ||
| I mean, demons aren't a race of humans. | ||
| Well, they certainly seem to be described that way. | ||
| They have the equipment to mate with the daughters of the world. | ||
| What appears to be going on there based on the archaeological record we've been able to find in Deuteronomy, there's a reference to the bed of King Og of Bashan, which we've actually found. | ||
| It's something like 11 feet long, which interestingly, any portrayals of these kind of godlike beings that we have from the artistic record from around the world, they're all about 11 or 12 feet tall, interestingly. | ||
| But yeah, I think that what's going on with the bed of King Aga Bashan is it's a ritual bed, you know, where there would be some kind of religious temple ritual in which a demonic spirit or a god from their perspective would be invited to possess one of the sexual partners in the coupling. | ||
| And that's what the Babylonians, too. | ||
| Yeah, this is what the Babylonians are doing, yeah, and that that's producing that offspring. | ||
| So I think that, you know, you have to see, you know, maybe you can see, you know, like you were saying with Tao De Shadan, you could see a way in which God is giving us technology and to facilitate our development towards some end, but you also have to see a parallel one in which demonic forces are offering us technologies in order to destroy ourselves and in which God occasionally, you know, at the flood and at the Tower of Babel intervenes to set that back and put time back on the clock for us to prevent us from destroying ourselves. | ||
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unidentified
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Will he do that again? | |
| I am not sure. | ||
| I think it's entirely possible that, you know, following the incarnation of Christ, it's sort of only going in one direction and we're heading toward some kind of end point here. | ||
| You mentioned like when it's – I'll tell you what. | ||
| We have to go to a commercial break. | ||
| And when we come back, I think we'll hit these mythological elements, but maybe some of the more practical problems of transhumanism. | ||
| That's exactly where I was going to segue, so looking forward to it. | ||
| So coming back in just a moment, but before we go, birchgold.com slash bannon. | ||
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| All right, War Room Posse, we are back, and I'm here with Grayson Kway, author of The Transhumanist Temptation, a fantastic book from Crisis Publications. | ||
| And Grayson, I want to talk a little bit about the practical difficulties that transhumanism and techno-optimism pose for Christians. | ||
| Something that we cover a lot is the eugenic underpinnings of transhumanism and the current projects to, for instance, select embryos pre-implantation. | ||
| Basically, you produce 10, 15, maybe 20 embryos and then select the supreme one and hook the rest into the cherub ward. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm against that just for practical purposes. | ||
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unidentified
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You know, I didn't want to, I wouldn't have wanted my parents to be like, oh, this one's going to go bald in his 20s, swipe left. | |
| Yeah, you know, if it had been my mom's choice, I probably would have been taller, smarter, and quieter. | ||
| But, you know, she chose wisely, I think. | ||
| Also, too, there are other real barriers, you know, that I think a lot of Christians see these as sacred boundaries you do not cross. | ||
| You look at Elon Musk's project with Neuralink. | ||
| Peter Thiel has kind of a parallel project with BlackRock Neurotech. | ||
| And you have Synchron invested in by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. | ||
| And now Sam Altman, perhaps just to spite Musk, is co-founding the MERGE brain-computer interfaces to link you to what they believe to be the kind of God in seed form, the digital God that will soon grow into artificial general and then artificial superintelligence. | ||
| So looking at all these different things, even, hey, just even the smartphone, right? | ||
| For you, where are these lines? | ||
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unidentified
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Where are the barriers? | |
| And why should Christians reject this? | ||
| If this can make them healthier, if this can make them smarter, if this can give their children a leg up in a very economically competitive world, why should Christians reject it? | ||
| Yeah, so one thing I knew going into writing this book was no matter what I say, I'm going to be accused of being a Lighthead of just hating Christianity, or just hating technology rather, of hating technology, right? | ||
| One of the responses I got from a transhumanist type was like, oh, if you'd been around, you know, 200,000 years ago, you would have been saying, no, we can't sharpen sticks. | ||
| We got to just throw rocks. | ||
| Sharpened sticks are an abomination, right? | ||
| But I think that the reason the transhumanists and the tech optimist types tend to react this way when you question technology is because they don't have any philosophical framework for asking and answering the question of when is it too far and how should we apply technology. | ||
| And I think that natural law provides that framework. | ||
| So just to give a few quick examples, people will say like, oh, you're already a transhumanist. | ||
| You wear contact lenses and maybe you get a knee replacement or have an artificial pacemaker put in your heart to regulate your heartbeat. | ||
| To me, none of these are transhumanist technologies. | ||
| We know what an eye is for. | ||
| The excellence of the eye is to see, right? | ||
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This is very platonic, Aristotelian, right? | |
| We know what an eye is for. | ||
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If my eyes don't see well, it's a perfectly legitimate application of technology to create a device, a pair of eyeglasses or a pair of contact lenses, that I can use to supply that deficiency. | |
| We know what a good eye does, and we can make my eye do that. | ||
| In the same way like a prosthesis, if I lose my hand, the prosthesis that they give me will try to replicate the form and function of the appendage that I've lost. | ||
| Now, if you want to replace my hand with a laser gun, now we're in transhumanist territory. | ||
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If you lost your hand, would you replace it with a laser gun? | |
| It sounds pretty cool, but no, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe a hook. | ||
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I think it would be wrong. | |
| Yeah, well, a hook's kind of like an attempt at an approximation, right? | ||
| We've gotten a little better at it now, though. | ||
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And I think that this is really sad because I want to be a tech optimist. | |
| I would love to just say full steam ahead on this stuff because there's so many technologies that can help us flourish better as humans, as the kind of beings that we've been created to be. | ||
| But unfortunately, we just don't have the ability to draw the line. | ||
| One example I go into in my book is artificial wombs. | ||
| So there's actually a wonderful application of artificial wombs, potential application of artificial wombs. | ||
| We don't have the technology yet that we can use for humans. | ||
| They've tried to grow a lamb embryo in a bag. | ||
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Yeah, the biobag. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But assuming we had this technology that we could use on humans, right now, if a woman goes into labor before her unborn child is viable, that child will die. | ||
| Or if it's a situation where the mother's life is being threatened by her pregnancy, even from kind of a Catholic bioethical standpoint, they'll say, okay, you can induce labor, even though that's going to be a death sentence for the child because it's a doctrine of double effect. | ||
| You're not trying to kill the child. | ||
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You're trying to save the mother's life, treating the child as a second patient, but unfortunately, there's no chance of saving it. | |
| If you had an artificial womb, you could then quickly transfer that child to the biobag or the gestation pod or whatever form it takes and allow it to continue developing to the point of viability. | ||
| And in that case, everybody lives. | ||
| The mother and the child both get to survive. | ||
| Interestingly, there were, you know, when this was first tested, when the biobag was first kind of tested, there were feminists who came out and said, we don't want this technology because it undermines the argument for abortion. | ||
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Because now you can end your pregnancy without killing your baby and you're still stuck with a baby and they don't want that. | |
| My friend Jennifer Billock, she wrote the book Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman. | ||
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And she argues forcefully that the push towards IVF and then artificial wounds is a quite literal replacement of the woman, the essential biological woman, or an attempt to do so. | |
| Yeah, well, they want this to become the new norm. | ||
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You see this with Nor Siddiqui and the ORCID embryo screening thing where she says like sex should just be for fun. | |
| Embryo screening should be for babies. | ||
| Like no children should be conceived through sex anymore. | ||
| That's in fact reckless. | ||
| On that note, I mean, you've got like Sam Altman has invested in conception, which does the same. | ||
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What's the guy's name, Steve Tzu, if I'm pronouncing his Chinese name properly? | |
| And then Orchid Health and a number of other operations. | ||
| They're doing everything possible to resuscitate the eugenic project with the pre-implantation genetic screening. | ||
| And in the case of, say, TA-SACS or Down syndrome or any other genetic disorder, even a real horrific predisposition towards cancer, you can see from a practical level how that would save the future child from having any of these genetic disorders. | ||
| And of course, then it would also take it out of the gene pool body. | ||
| Well, screening doesn't save the child from having that disorder. | ||
| It just kills the children that have that disorder. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, it preserves. | ||
| But one way or the other, I can see from a practical standpoint, especially if you don't believe in divine intervention in the physical processes, why one would want to do that. | ||
| But from your perspective, and especially from the Catholic perspective, you said it right there. | ||
| I mean, you literally are creating anywhere from five to 15 to 20 embryos that you then shuffle off to the cherub ward. | ||
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Does that raise all the red flags? | |
| Yeah, no, I mean, this is a, you know, we're staring down the barrel of like a truly demonic society where every person that's walking around has, you know, comes at the cost of 12 undesirables who were killed so that that one child could come into existence. | ||
| I have no problem with, you know, the desire to cure these genetic disorders. | ||
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I think sort of the opposite extreme you can go to is just to try to say something like, oh, everyone's perfect just the way they are. | |
| And, you know, all disabilities are socially constructed anyway, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| No, you know, natural law would also reject that idea. | ||
| We know what a flourishing human looks like. | ||
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And the Catholic Church has, in fact, said in its bioethical documents that they are not opposed to gene therapies that could fix these in utero. | |
| that if you get pregnant with a Down syndrome child and there's a genetic therapy that could be used to correct that child's genome and utero, that there's no problem with that and no moral barrier to doing that. | ||
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My objection is to throwing out these children and also to decoupling reproduction from the sexual act. | |
| It really changes the relationship from parent-child to consumer product. | ||
| You have this child that you custom ordered. | ||
| We've already seen examples of this mindset where people have sued the IVF companies that were supposed to be screening and said, well, I wanted a boy and I got a girl, or I wanted a healthy baby and I got a baby that has this disorder. | ||
| This is not a kind of healthy world in which to bring children. | ||
| My daughter, who's two years old, comes to my wife and I as a gift from the hand of God, whether you want to take that metaphorically or literally, but she is the child that we have been given and it's our duty as parents to love her however she comes to us. | ||
| If we had had the opportunity to sort of customize her ahead of time and order her the way we would customize all her traits on a website, I don't think it would be possible to love her as much as this gift that's been given to my wife and I through the love that we have for each other. | ||
| And all those surprises, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
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A lot of faith there, and it's a beautiful faith. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| What about Neuralink or any of the other brain-computer interfaces? | ||
| Obviously, there's potential for healing. | ||
| You give people who are locked in or at least severely paralyzed the ability to interact with the world. | ||
| You also maybe have the possibility of upgrading human intellect by having a permanent Google brain. | ||
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Where do you draw the line on brain modification and brain-computer interfaces? | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's very good marketing on behalf of Neuralink because the first guy that they gave one to was a quadriplegic who wanted to use it so he could move a mouse around with his mind so he could play civilization with his buddies and do an online Bible study. | ||
| And Mario Kart, which, by the way, as far as that goes, that's the only line that they didn't cross. | ||
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I feel like it's good that he was able to play Mario Kart. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a virtuous and noble. | ||
| Mario Kart is actually one of John Finnis' fundamental human goods. | ||
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Oh, I'm not surprised to hear that. | |
| Yeah, that we can deduce from human nature, through natural law. | ||
| Yeah, I think many of these technologies are useful as tools, but become a problem when they're used as just sort of fundamental upgrades, air quotes, to human nature, right? | ||
| So something like kind of a neural interface with an imagine you could strap on a pair of robotic arms that could lift two tons and use those on a construction site. | ||
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This would be great. | |
| It would stop people from having work-related injuries over the course of their construction career. | ||
|
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It would vastly improve worker efficiency. | |
| It would decrease construction costs probably over the long run. | ||
| It would have all these great benefits. | ||
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I don't have a problem with construction worker, Joe Hardhat, clocking in at the beginning of the day, puts on his neural helmet, puts on his robot arms, starts lifting up girders and building a building. | |
| What I don't want is this guy to turn into Doc Ock from Spider-Man and the arms start whispering to him and now he goes home with the arms still on and moves through the world. | ||
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Just his new default is I'm a forearmed transhuman cyborg now. | |
| It's a difficult question. | ||
| There's a document that we talk a lot about, Human Augmentation, the Dawn of a New Paradigm. | ||
| It was produced for the UK Ministry of Defense. | ||
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I think it came out 2021. | |
| But they lay out in a very sane and rational way how, to go back to your example of eyeglasses, right? | ||
| The human eye in its natural state is going to be flawed but useful. | ||
| But human eye with glasses are going to be even more useful. | ||
| Night vision now gives you a completely new sense in a way. | ||
| And then it's only a few more clicks, at least in this perspective, to genetically altering humans for perfect vision or maybe even bionic eyeballs, right? | ||
| And I wonder then, like for them, the rationale is national security. | ||
| If we don't cyborgize our soldiers, we don't have super soldiers, then China will or somebody will. | ||
| Do you buy that justification for radical human augmentation that whether it be national security or even something as menial as, I don't know, finance, that to an extent, this augmentation is either baked in or you get left behind? | ||
| Well, I think there's, you know, you can certainly make kind of practical arguments like that. | ||
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I'm definitely sympathetic to the argument that if we don't try to build some kind of AI, that China's going to surpass us and just eat everybody's lunch. | |
| And they have no qualms about how to apply transhumanist technologies, certainly. | ||
| But I think you have to ask yourself the question, like, what are we ultimately fighting to preserve? | ||
| Like, what is the end goal here? | ||
| And I think that by making those kinds of compromises, we're sort of giving up the game. | ||
| Like, you know, if we win, there's no we left. | ||
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There's no humanity left, right? | |
| You know, I'm, like I said, I think the proper framework to use is, you know, is this a tool or is this a modification of us as humans? | ||
| You know, night vision goggles, you put them on, you take them off, whatever. | ||
| Maybe someday we come up with some kind of bionic augmentation that can allow soldiers to toggle between night vision using their own eyes. | ||
| But I would not want that to become something that they would then carry back into civilian life and have this new capacity or functionality that human beings don't by nature have, where they could then, you know, go to the bar and use it as a parlor trick. | ||
| Yeah, turn out all the groping parties. | ||
| I'm sure you would be much more skilled. | ||
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Not that I've ever been to anything like that. | |
| I never seem to get the invitation. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| I'm getting too old. | ||
| So the question then of Christians facing a society in which the wealthiest men on earth, supported by the most powerful government on earth, governments, really the United States and China, and to some extent Russia, and certainly around Europe, the zeitgeist of the age, as you described quite beautifully in your book, the zeitgeist of the age is transhuman, at least from an elite perspective. | ||
| A lot of times, you know, I think especially post-2020, people look at like the World Economic Forum, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Great Reset, people like you all know Harari and the concept of homo deus, and they think, okay, transhumanism is this globalist thing. | ||
| Transhumanism is this liberal project. | ||
| But, you know, one of the things that we're definitely fellow travelers on is calling out the right-wing strains of transhumanism and even the Christian strains of transhumanism. | ||
| Do you find that arguing for limitations on technological adoption with Christians or other people on the right is more difficult? | ||
|
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And what arguments do you make to the Christian or to the conservative that there is a line that you've gone too far in crossing? | |
| Yeah, well, so the right-wing transhumanists I write about in my book, my two big examples are kind of sort of the techno, the tech right that, you know, Mark Andreessen, people. | ||
| Yeah, Mark Andreessen's my big example that, you know, Bannon's been feuding with quite a bit over different things. | ||
| And right went on. | ||
| I'm very much a Bannonite in that argument. | ||
| Yeah, where these are people who, you know, are all in on the merge. | ||
| We need to, you know, we need to evolve. | ||
| We need to bootstrap ourselves. | ||
| We need to create these technologies bigger and faster, move fast and break things. | ||
| The thing you're breaking in this instance is humanity. | ||
| And then you kind of have the other side of right-wing transhumanism is the sort of push for eugenics that you're getting from kind of the vitalist side, the Bronze Age mindset people. | ||
| What these people have in common is kind of a contempt for humanity as such, for unaugmented humanity, for the idea that there is intrinsic human value. | ||
| Interestingly, Andreessen tries to kind of appropriate this language of eudaimonia, but what he fails to see is that there's a normative aspect to it, that it's rooted in our human nature, that it's not just this free-floating pursuit of whatever we happen to desire. | ||
| That owes much more to Sartre than to somebody like Aristotle. | ||
| When it comes to Christians, I think the key is reintroducing people to this natural law framework that I think has gotten lost even for many self-described Christians today. | ||
| One of the examples I include in the book is there was that Alabama Supreme Court ruling last year that was actually not particularly earth-shattering. | ||
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It just said, you know, the state has a wrongful death statute. | |
| You know, if you're pregnant and somebody hits your car with theirs and you have a miscarriage as a result, you can recover damages for the loss of your unborn child. | ||
| And the Alabama Supreme Court basically ruled that, you know, if you do IVF and you've got frozen embryos in a lab and one of the lab techs knocks over the test tube and destroys your embryo, you can recover damages for that lost unborn child in the same way that you could in the car accident. | ||
| You know, again, not a huge deal. | ||
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Just try not to knock over the test tubes, right? | |
| But, you know, the left's response, of course, you know, to be expected is, you know, handsmaid's tail dystopia. | ||
| Somebody set off a bomb outside the Attorney General's office in Alabama. | ||
| You know, there's all the Kamala Harris weighs in on this thing. | ||
| It's a whole hysterical thing. | ||
| What disappointed me was not the left's response, which is to be expected, but the right's response, which was immediately to say, like, no, no, we didn't mean it. | ||
| You know, this is Alabama, super majority GOP legislature, self-described, you know, conservative, pro-life Republicans, immediately pass a law saying, no, no, you can do IVF. | ||
| There's no liability there. | ||
| Republican governor signs it. | ||
| National Republicans run away from the issue as fast as they can, denounce the Alabama Supreme Court decision. | ||
| And it really shows how much people who are even self-described conservatives and even self-described Christians have adopted this mindset. | ||
| There was a free press article about the whole thing that I quote from where this woman basically says, you know, oh, I was for it in the beginning, but then I was like, oh, you mean I can't just have my frozen embryos thrown away? | ||
| I can't just, you know, vivisect my unborn children at will. | ||
| This is horrible. | ||
| You know, they're not real in the same way that my child, you know, sitting in my living room watching TV is real. | ||
| And it's like, well, you've adopted this transhumanist mindset. | ||
| You've adopted this idea of the human as kind of the disembodied will. | ||
| And because your embryos neither have a will of their own that they can assert, nor are they being willed into existence by you, they have no validity. | ||
| Whereas if you take a sort of classical or Christian idea of human dignity as stemming from our embodiment, from our membership just in the human species, then no, there is no difference between these frozen embryos and your son watching TV. | ||
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They're both equally members of the human species and share in the human telos. | |
| Brother, I could go on with you on this for hours, but our time has come to a close. | ||
| Grayson, I really appreciate your intellect, your courage, and your proper pronunciation of Greek terms. | ||
| I have a lot to learn there. | ||
| The book is The Transhumanist Temptation by Grayson Kuay. | ||
|
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Where can we find it? | |
| You can find it on Amazon. | ||
| It's available as an e-book in print, like the audiobook. | ||
| If you hate my voice, good news. | ||
| I don't read the audiobook. | ||
| There's a narrator who does that. | ||
| You can also get it. | ||
| It's always best to get it straight from the publisher. | ||
| So that'll be SophiaInstitute.com. | ||
|
unidentified
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Slash Transhuman. | |
| Thank you very much, Grayson, I really appreciate it. | ||
| And also go to Birchgold.com. | ||
| Slash Bannon or text Bannon to 989-898 for your free copy of the Ultimate Guide For Gold in the Trump Era. | ||
| Also go to Tnusa.com slash Bannon for the TAX Network USA advice on all your taxes, or call 1-800-958-1000. | ||
| Warwick Posse, thank you very much. |
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