Anyone who doubts that the abolition of man is a present-day reality need only look at the British headlines from the past few weeks. The House of Commons approved bills that allow for assisted killing and for late-term abortion. That Labour left-winger Diane Abbott delivered one of the more insightful and sane speeches in the debate on the former is surely a sign of the strangeness of our time. By contrast, twelve Catholic MPs, to their shame, proved far more reliable servants of the culture of death.
While the headlines were dominated by this push to eliminate the most vulnerable members of British society, an article at Popular Mechanics was perhaps even more significant. Earlier this year, Yanchang Wei at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China successfully produced mouse embryos via androgenesis—reproduction by two fathers. Using an egg with its nucleus removed, he injected two sperm drawn from two different fathers, made some other genetic modifications, and had the embryos brought to term inside surrogate mothers. The results are both a testimony to man’s genius and to the Promethean power he now possesses. The creation of life itself has become something subject to our technical brilliance.
These two phenomena—the assumption of power over who lives and who dies, and the approaching era of the mechanical manipulation of the creation of human life—bring the question of what it means to be human into focus. Jean-Paul Sartre observed that human beings after the advent of nuclear warfare had to face an unprecedented choice: whether to continue to exist. Today, in an age of gene editing and IVF, we face an even more fundamental question: What exactly does it mean to be human? Abortion, euthanasia, and eugenics all assume answers to this question, even if their advocates have not self-consciously thought through what those answers are. And all press in a direction that will be increasingly intolerant of anyone deemed imperfect by the standards of the norm—whatever those standards might be.
Iceland provides a good example. It decided some years ago that being human does not include people with Down syndrome. They are now almost all eliminated before leaving the birth canal. The same looks to be true in the U.K. for babies in the womb that might pose an emotional problem to the mother. They are not human either. And the U.K. is moving rapidly to considering old people who are a drain on resources—whether the financial ones of the National Health Service or the emotional ones of family—as not being human. Once the emotive rhetoric of therapy is laid aside, that is what these policies amount to: practical applications of an assumed definition of what it means to be human, even if their advocates do not care to clearly state what such a definition is. And developments such as those in the Chinese lab make the issue even more acute: When we have the power to build human beings to any specifications we choose, the question of what it means to be human takes on obvious urgency.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s Madman accuses his audience of polite atheists of having no idea of the significance of their atheism. Killing God, he points out, requires that his assassins themselves rise to the challenge of being gods, of becoming those who create meaning and value. Faced with their incomprehension, he acknowledges that he has come too soon. But that time is now upon us. Even the normative notion of what constitutes a human being—worthy of life, of being brought to term, of being cared for when vulnerable—is now a matter for contentious debate.
This points to an even more serious challenge. According to the Madman, “we” must become gods ourselves. But who is that “we” going to be? Which of us will be allowed to be gods in this emerging world? Who will be the judge and jury of normative anthropology, and what criteria will they use for making their judgments?
The answer is becoming clear: the masters of the technically possible. When the broader culture is dominated by therapeutic and utilitarian notions of happiness, it is increasingly hard to make a case in the public square against the logic of “we can so we should” that drives the eugenic direction of science, whether relating to reproduction or AI.
This dynamic was starkly demonstrated by those Catholic MPs who voted for death despite their professed religious commitments. These included the Liberal Democrat Chris Coghlan, who was surprised and offended when his parish priest kept his word and denied him Communion after the vote. His argument—that his faith does not and will not have any relevance to his role as a public official—is as predictable as it is incoherent. We live at a time when the distinction between private and public has been all but eliminated, making any claim that assumes such to be implausible. Further, votes on abortion and euthanasia are not akin to those on business regulations or speed limits. They go to the very heart of what it means to be human. Thus, his claim also amounts to saying that his religious faith has no relevance to what he understands human beings to be.
In short, Coghlan concedes the Nietzschean point: God is dead, at least in matters of public policy. His Catholicism is but a form of private therapy. On Sundays, he’s a nihilist, going through the motions of religious rituals whose truth extends no further than the church’s sanctuary. And in doing so he also removes any basis upon which we might resist the dehumanizing impulses that lie at the heart of a therapeutic and technological culture—one that embraces both death and transhumanism. With no God to define our limits and ends, and no way of judging in advance the consequences of our votes for death and our experiments with human genetics, we stand on the verge of doing what no other creature has ever achieved: abolishing ourselves. Does religion have nothing to say to that?
