How Postmodernism Became Posthumanism
How Postmodernism Became Posthumanism
by David Souto Alcalde at Brownstone Institute
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.”
We are facing a civilizational struggle, disguised as a simple cultural battle, between the human principles that place the child at the center of the world—a center also for those who have not wanted or been able to be parents but have performed an important service as neighbors, uncles, godparents—and the posthuman doctrine that finds voluntary sterility as a source of pride and pets as a hollow antidote to loneliness.
Immersed in this war, we dodge a barrage of child-phobic propaganda that turns motherhood into a nightmare ( Five Little Wolves by Ruíz de Azúa), calls for apartheid for children ( Against the Children by Meruane), demands the right to regret having had children once middle age is reached, even when the person doing so claims to love them to death (Maier), or demands that parents pay grandmothers for every hour they spend caring for their grandchildren (Anna Freixas).
All this is called moral progress in the West. I experienced a taste of this a couple of weeks ago when, while cleaning the kitchen, I decided to put on “First Dates” on TV and found myself before an elegant 77-year-old Colombian woman and her 44-year-old daughter. The latter, in addition to being a mother and sporting a stunning physique that combined the best of Shakira and Petrarch’s Beatrice, was also a grandmother. After presenting themselves as Catholics, these two women were able to experience firsthand the degeneration of European culture by contrasting their humane ideals with the nihilistic lifestyles of their two dates.
On the one hand, a hormonal Italian man in his thirties who, despite maintaining a sexual drive as healthy as ungainly, believed he was fifteen years old and kept repeating, to the scandal of the Colombian deity, that he wanted to go out and party and was too young to have children. On the other hand, an elderly Spaniard who complained about how old his date was and who repeated like a petulant parrot to the Caribbean lady that he was an atheist, although he was not an atheist who, like C. Tangana in the song “Soy ateo” (“I’m an atheist”), showed his closeness to divinity by dancing with Nathy Peluso in the apse of Toledo Cathedral, but rather a lonely, sullen man, consumed by an ideology far removed from any radical defense of humanity that atheism might have had in other contexts or circumstances.
Meanwhile, I check my phone’s messages and alerts. One friend sent me tweets about the Great Replacement theory, and another sent me a video of Roberto Vaquero, talking about the destruction of the West at the hands of Islamic culture. I agree that multiculturalism is a weapon of civilizational annihilation, and that mass immigration is a sadistic maneuver by the elites to strip both natives and immigrants of all roots and dignity, and to generate crime and social conflict.
But I also think that we are completely wrong to blame foreigners for destroying “our Western values.” Aren’t we, in fact, the plague that threatens to annihilate their “backward cultures”? Do Latin Americans and Muslims attack the family, the community, or the scientifically proven biological fact that the human race is divided into men and women?
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“—that is, 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.
These illusions of deification have been incubated from the beginning by liberalism, a Protestant ideology that nullifies our will in everything that is humanly decidable (for example, market regulation), only to encourage it in regard to everything that can be forbidden, promising us happiness, self-determination, and the right to change our natures. The latest perversity of liberalism—not to be confused with capitalism, also present in non-liberal societies—has been to “scientifically” deny, now that AI is waiting in the wings, the existence of free will (Robert Sapolsky et al.). Liberalism has always had socialism as its great ally. Designed as a liberal vaccine (a weakened liberal virus), socialism has also ended up declaring war on human nature through liberal dogmas such as blind faith in progress, technology, or the need to break with tradition.
Whether through market or state totalitarianism—both of which nullify the civilizing achievements of the market and the state—liberalism and socialism have become autoimmune diseases of the West that have ended up merging into posthumanism, the ideology undergirding the woke doctrine, the 2030 Agenda, and digital globalism.
Posthumanism seeks to rob us of the last shred of humanity left in our lives with the promise of turning us into gods who will leave Homo sapiens in the dustbin of history. In this sense, sterility, “petism,” and childphobia are practices that encourage us to stop viewing ourselves as human—that is, being mortal and subject to a higher power—and to instead think of ourselves as self-sufficient Gods.
Only by not reproducing, and seeking to control those miracles called birth and death through abortion and euthanasia, can we falsely deify ourselves by considering ourselves the authors of the beginning and ending of our own existence. In patting ourselves on the back for not having offspring under the tragic pretext of “self-actualization,” we go from transmitting to our children the miracle of a life that will never be ours but that includes and transcends us, to being the deified owners of the lives of pets, whom we can see being born and dying, but whom we do not allow to reproduce, lest they conspire against us the way mythological giants once conspired against the heavens. Replacing a child with a pet implies transforming the pet into our servant and believer and perceiving ourselves as demiurges who can control and administer other lives devoid of freedom.
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?
If there is one thing we should be clear on today, it’s that the origin of this plague of imbecility is the Enlightenment, a movement of civilizational annihilation in the service of predatory imperialism, which England, France, Germany, and the United States have established everywhere since the 18th century.
The Enlightenment has turned divinity and eternity into banal consumer goods and proclaimed the need for Western humanity to abandon the most basic religious precepts (the right to life, to the family, and to tradition) and surrender to the unknown, to be managed by a technocratic elite.
The goal is the creation of a new man who must demonstrate absolute faith in scientism—not science—by, for example, risking his own life by fearfully and unwittingly injecting himself with mRNA “vaccines,” or by assuming, against all logic, that we lack free will and must obey AI.
Paradoxically, science is the great victim of the Enlightenment, which declares it incompatible with religion despite the fact that it has often gone hand in hand with the latter, from the founding of universities to the Mendelian establishment of genetics (Servet or Bruno were not, in fact, vilely executed for their scientific theories, but for political and doctrinal reasons).
The fundamentalism of the Enlightenment is evident in contemporary jihadists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, who declared humanity and religion incompatible, despite the fact that religion, as Francisco de Vitoria and Giambattista Vico have shown us, is the true source of universalist principles and the origin of civilization.
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.
With all due respect to donkeys, horses, and mules, we could say that the West has become what it has become, because we have been deceived into choosing to stop being donkeys (small, slow, intelligent, analog) and become horses (large, fast, predictable, digital ), without understanding that humans belong more to the donkey lineage (Balaam’s donkey; Jesus’s donkey; Platero, soft and hairy) than to that of horses, on whose backs ride the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
By trying so hard to replace our slow but wise donkey nature with the artificial and remote-controlled intelligence of horses, we have mingled with them until we have become mules (that is, sterile animals). We can console ourselves with the thought that it is within our power to change the color of our eyes, inject ourselves with Botox, legally convert our hands into feet, our nostrils into vaginas, or have an avatar as a partner, but we are already beasts of burden, sterile, condemned to obey, without the possibility of braying or giving birth to lives.
How Postmodernism Became Posthumanism
by David Souto Alcalde at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society