← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we have a special episode discussing Grayson Kuei's new book, the Transhumanist. How Technology and Ideology Are Reshaping Humanity and How to resist. Grayson Quay is excellent. He's a wonderful thinker. He draws from the great books, the entire Western canon. Actually, reading his book is somewhat like being introduced to a whole library. There are citations on every page. I really appreciated his thought process and how he draws from the ancients to handle modern problems. In our conversation today, we'll discuss Dante, teleology, Aristotle, nature and natural law, Plato, Christian spirituality and the ethics of technology, medical ethics, and much, much more. So join us today for a special episode on the Transhumanist Temptation with Grayson Qu.
- [00:59]
Grayson Quay
Foreign.
- [01:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five, and serve as the chancellor and general counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. I am recording on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we can help you read the Great Books. We have over 50 episodes to help you or your small group read the Iliad and the Odyssey. And we have over 20 episodes on the Greek plays like the Oresteia and Antigone. And we start next week into our studies on Plato with an introduction and then two episodes on the dialogue. First, Alcibiades, with almost 20 episodes on Plato's dialogues already recorded. So no excuses. You can read the Great Books with Ascend. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters who have access to our written guides that help them through the Great Books. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information today. Today we have something fun. I'm looking forward to today. Today we welcome back to the podcast Mr. Grayson Quay to discuss his new book, the Transhumanist, How Technology and Ideology Are Reshaping Humanity and How to resist. Grayson, welcome back.
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Grayson Quay
Good to be back. Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. You joined us for a wonderful conversation on. What was that book? Five of the Iliad?
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Grayson Quay
I think it was. Yeah. It was the one where, you know, he's trying to fight the gods. Right? It was the. Is that Diomedes's?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Diomedes fights the gods. It's wonderful. Yeah. Him like, being held by Athena and spearing Aries in the gut. It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
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Grayson Quay
I love that. I always love the moment where he. He stabs Aphrodite in the hand and she just kind of this great comic relief moment of her rushing back up to Olympus.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's a good one. No, I appreciate our conversation out there. I just remember a lot of C.S. lewis illusions, which you can't ask for much more than Homer and C.S. lewis together in a single conversation. Before we dive into your book, just give us like a little introduction of who you are.
- [02:54]
Grayson Quay
Yeah, so I've done a lot of things. I worked in political communications for a while. I was a classical school teacher for a while. I was a journalist for a long time. Right now I'm working as a ghostwriter. So I write op EDS for people who then, you know, have them published under their names. And I'm, you know. But my one big project I've been working on for quite some time is obviously this book. I wrote most of the first draft back in May of last year, so May of 2024, and sort of spent the subsequent, you know, six or eight months revising it and getting it into as good of shape as I. As I was able. And now it is here. It's being released on July 15th. So if you would like to go out and buy one, I would very much appreciate it.
- [03:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's a wonderful book. I appreciate it. I got to have a little sneak peek, which I very much appreciated. So the book's on transhumanism, so maybe before we kind of dive into what that means and kind of like sketch out some of your preliminary ideas, what inspired you to write the book?
- [03:58]
Grayson Quay
Yeah, so there's a woman who's a journalist, her name's Catherine D. She goes by default friend on Twitter and in some of her writing. But she had this tweet and I don't, you know, I don't have it in front of me. It's kind of been lost to the. The ages. But it was something along the lines of that the real dichotomy moving forward, the real split in politics and culture, or a major one, is going to be between transhumanists and people who oppose transhumanism. And I just couldn't get that out of my head because I. I've been a freelance writer sort of continuously to varying degrees since about 2016, just always as kind of some kind of supplementary source of income. And then as a full time journalist, I did a lot of opinion writing too. And one thing that was. Frustrated me about myself as a writer is I felt like I had all these eclectic interests that didn't really cohere around anything. And I saw that tweet and was like, oh, that's the through line. That's sort of the golden thread that runs through all these things that interest me. Like, I'm very interested in bioethical issues like abortion and surrogacy. I'm very interested in technology and AI and sort of media ecology stuff. I'm very interested in religion and in this kind of sort of Eastern mystic re. Enchantment movement thing that's going on. I'm really interested in post liberal critiques of, you know, liberalism and. And modern economics. And then, you know, I'm. All of these things seemed really disparate to me and suddenly I was like, oh, I think what they all have in common is this idea of transhumanism and opposing it and wanting to preserve that. So, you know, transhumanism, the way I define it in the book is I'm not just looking at technological applications. You know, putting a microchip in your brain or altering your genomes. You can grow gills or uploading your brain to the clouds, you can live forever. These are all like manifestations of transhumanism. But I think at root it's an ideology. It's. It's sort of a mindset or a philosophy which has its roots going back centuries and centuries and centuries. Um, so in the book I talk about David Hume with the is ought fallacy that, you know, well, maybe human beings have a nature or something, but that doesn't mean you have to abide by that just because you are a certain type of creature that doesn't tell you anything about how you ought to live. Which is a huge departure from Aristotle and the whole classical tradition. And Sartre says roughly the same thing when he says, you know, if you have a pocket knife, its essence precedes its existence. Someone planned out what it was for and made it for a purpose. But you as a human, as the product of blind forces of the materialistic universe, your existence precedes your essence. You get to. The meaning of your life is to give your life a meaning, you get to make it up. And in fact, you have to. And that's the same thing Nietzsche is saying with. With the whole God is dead thing. And then in. In opposition to this, you have what you would call the natural law tradition that stretches from, you know, Plato and Aristotle up through, you know, Augustine and Aquinas and the whole Christian Middle Ages and even forward to some of the, you know, some of the Enlightenment thinkers. Natural laws, you know, in many ways the foundation of the American founding. And we've, you know, totally abandoned this to the point that it's hard for many people to even conceptualize anymore.
- [07:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. One thing I really appreciated about your work was how much you pull from the Western canon. It's like every other paragraph, you're pulling from an author of a great text and kind of weaving them together to build a conversation. It's one of the things that I really enjoyed about your work. It's one of those books that if you read, you're actually introduced to an entire library. And that's, again, something I was very grateful for because it made me realize, like, man, I need to be more well read. There's a lot of authors I need to be more conversant with to be able kind of jump into this conversation. But I think you laid them out really well, kind of, you know, you laid out a lot of things. I think we need to get into those. We need to unpack them. But just as a preliminary, when you wrote this text, like, who's your target audience? Like, who. Who was on your heart when you were actually trying to explain the problem of transhumanism?
- [08:33]
Grayson Quay
Yeah. So it's being published by Sophia Institute Press, which is a Catholic publisher. So I imagine a lot of the, you know, audience who's. Who's kind of buying books from this publisher will be Catholics. But I didn't necessarily write it just for Catholics or even just for Christians. I say in the opening that I'm. I'm planning to be explicit about my faith commitments, my. My Christian faith, because I just don't think there's necessarily a good answer for why we shouldn't become transhuman. If. If God. I think, you know, if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted. Right. As like Dostoevsky said. But I. I do try to reach out to those people, and I want to give them some sense. I mean, if nothing else, to, like, scare them a little bit and have them think through, like, no, where are we actually headed? Like, where is technology actually taking us? It's not just your iPhone gets a little bit better every year. Like, there's serious trends in our technology and in our culture as these interactions that are already fairly well progressed and that if they continue to progress, will lead us to some very, very frightening places. And, you know, I say, like, if you. If you don't have any faith, if you don't believe in God, then the best I can offer you is maybe you should consider sticking with humanity because it's tried and true, because it works. Because there's some degree of ancestral wisdom that's been passed down about how to be human and that if you abandon that, then you. You sever yourself from all of your ancestors, and anything you pick up over the course of your life will be of no use to your descendants. You'll be all alone in the dark, just sort of groping around. And it's. It's a really sad and difficult way to live. And I think that in many ways, we've already started to do that. Like, it's. If you think about, you know, in some ways, I. I quote Mary Harrington a lot. She's a brilliant journalist. She wrote a book called Feminism Against Progress. But in that, she argues that the birth control pill is the first widespread transhumanist technology. And I think she's right about that. Because if you think about, you know, a generation that has access to easy access to an oral contraceptive that's reliable, that's a huge change in how a species reproduces. You know, it's the kind of thing. That's the kind of shift you might see over millions of years of evolution. And it happened in a single generation. And we had thousands of years of literature and folk wisdom and everything else about human sexuality and how the sexes relate to each other, and all of much of that was just rendered obsolete overnight by this. Or at least that's how people. People viewed it, and that's how people responded to it. So in many ways, we're already several steps into this transhumanist experiment, into succumbing to this temptation, and I think we're already seeing the poison fruits of it.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. One thing I really appreciate about your text is that you try and take a step back and look at the overall kind of historical picture. Like, this thing did not develop in a vacuum. It did not pop up in the last 10 years. You make a claim towards the beginning of the book that humanism is actually the first step towards transhumanism. Can you kind of explain that claim a little bit and how you're trying to show transhumanism, as you mentioned earlier, not just, like, immediately as an example of technology, but as an ideology that's actually animating a lot of different things in our culture.
- [12:19]
Grayson Quay
Yeah, that's an interesting one. So I'm. Throughout the book, I kind of use anti transhumanist or anti transhumanism to describe what I'm trying to do, which is a little bit of a clunky term, I admit, but I didn't want to use humanism because I think the Wells sort of been poisoned on that term. The American Humanist association is just atheists. It's it's an organization for atheists. Kurt Vonnegut was. Was honorary president for a time, which I find interesting. But, yeah, humanism tends to mean today just, you know, that man is the measure of all things. That's this, you know, slogan of the sort of extreme wing of the Renaissance. And I. I acknowledge that there's a long tradition of Christian humanism, which I think is really good. I just think that the way we usually hear and interpret the. The term humanism is leading us to transhumanism. Because once you've set up man as the measure of all things, it ceases to be a stable platform from which to measure, you know, once you have the technology to remake humanity into what you want it to be said.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think that the problem with that type of. And that species of humanism, right, is that it divorces the human from basically the cosmos, where there's nothing that orders what we mean by human or human nature, and it just becomes very malleable. And so you can see then. And I think this is one of the things that you track really well is that you show transhumanism as an ideology, first, an anthropology. How is it that we actually view man? And then it gets coupled with technology and. And now just basically anything we imagine we can start to actually make real, which is something that prior generations did not. And so it looks like technology is. Is kind of the gasoline on the fire, if you will. That's allowing a lot of these ideologies to actually have some really concrete substantiations in our culture. Earlier in your introduction, though, you talk about teleology, right? You talk about Plato and Aristotle. Can you talk a little bit about, like, for those who aren't familiar, what is teleology and why is it so important when we look at, like, what is nature?
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Grayson Quay
Yeah, so telos is an end, right, Or a goal, a proper. The thing at which something aims, right? So an oak acorn aims at becoming an oak tree. It fulfills its nature when it becomes an oak tree. And, you know, Aristotle, you know, I quote a line from Plato's Republic where he says, you know, if you have a good pruning hook is a one that prunes trees. Well, so what's a good man? You know, there's. There's qualities of a pruning hook that makes it a good pruning hook, whether it's being sharp, being well balanced, being long enough, whatever to do the job. What makes you a good man? Is. Is that a reasonable question? You know, Sarger would say no. There's such a thing as a good knife. There's not such a thing as a good person, except one that, like, embraces his freedom, I guess. And then Aristotle says something similar. He says, like, are we to. Are we to believe that there's an excellence proper to a shoemaker in making good shoes and not an excellence proper to man as himself? And this actually is very much of a piece with what you see in the. The Old Testament, where, you know, in Proverbs, you have wisdom crying aloud in the streets. Right. This is shockmaker. I don't speak Hebrew. Maybe perhaps to have to do the glottal.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
But sounded great. Yeah, sounded great. We'll go with it.
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Grayson Quay
But it's the same. If you then go back to Exodus, it's the same word that's used for the craftsmen who are recruited to work on the temple. And it's. They're usually translated differently. In Proverbs, it's translated wisdom, typically in American, in English Bibles, and in Exodus, it's translated skill. Because they're talking about, you know, stone carving and embroidery and things like that. But this is the same word, and that's exactly what Plato and Aristotle are getting at, is that there is an art or a craft to living well, the same way there's an art or a craft to carving a good chair. And I think that has to be your starting point. You know, what do we aim at? And for Aristotle, the answer is eudaimonia, happiness. Sometimes I use flourishing as a translation for that because I think it's sort of evokes what I'm getting at a little bit better. Yeah. And then this gets into the question of, like, using technology. Because when you object to some uses of technology as being unethical or as being transhumanist, sort of the automatic pushback you get is like, you're a Luddite. You don't like technology. And my response is, I love technology. What scares me is that we don't have the proper anthropology to use it responsibly. You know, the proper use to me of. Of, you know, just to take medical technology, for example, is to fix what's broken. It's to restore people to the type of flourishing proper to them, to the type of health and flourishing proper to a human setting my broken arm. Great. Thumbs up. Sewing a third arm between my shoulder blades. No, you shouldn't do that.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, yeah. No, very well said. I think you articulated that. Well, let me see if I can kind of regurgitate it a little bit insofar as that, I think the pruning hook, right? The knife example from players Republic really is kind of the example par excellence, right? So if we understand. Because the teleology really is at the heart of this kind of classical understanding of the cosmos, right? So if I understand that the purpose of the knife, the telos of the knife is to cut, I understand its purpose, right? This artifact actually has a purpose for which it was made, then I also understand what it means to be a good or bad knife, right? Understand the quality of the thing by its end. So I would understand that the good knife has to be sharp and the bad knife would be dull because its quality is predicated according to its purpose. And so you would say if you use it in human terms, you know, the virtue of the knife would be the sharp and the vice, the viciousness, right? Would that it would be dull. And you can even start to understand then what's good or bad for the knife. So things that would make it sharp and strong would be good. Things that would make it dull would be bad. And so I. I love how you transition there because you see that same teleology and you see the same argument that Plato and Aristotle make is like, okay, then what is the teleology of man? Because like you would say, I would say, oh, yeah, I know a good man. Oh, yeah, that person's over there, that's a good woman. Well, why do you call them good? To know that a thing is good, you have to understand its purpose. Do you understand the purpose of man? And then we have to get into what is the purpose of man. And so I love, though, what you said and what you talked about, like, on a more micro level of medical ethics and technology, because I think this is where you see things really clear. So as you said, like, your eye has a certain teleology. Like you have a purpose of the eye. And of course, you have a purpose of the eye. It has to see. And that purpose gives it a certain structure and order. We can study the eye. We understand its purpose. It has to have a certain order to actually achieve its purpose. And so, yeah, if you go to the doctor, the purpose of medicine is to restore sight. It's actually put you in a state of what is the teleology of the part that's broken and can we restore it? We want to fix our heart, we want to fix our eye, and we can do these things because it has a teleology, and therefore it has an order that can be restored. And I just. I just really want to stress Again, what you said, because I think this is something that people miss, is that then when you start doing things that are not connected to the teleology of the body, then there's a huge question of what is what you're even doing. Medicine, it might be done by doctors. It might be done by medical technology or drugs or hormones or whatever, but when you start doing something that's contrary to the teleology of the body, then are you really actually performing medicine anymore?
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Grayson Quay
Yeah. There's an essay I quote in my book by a transgender author named. Who goes by Andrea Long Chu, who's a biological male who has had, you know, surgeries to resemble a woman, and wrote this great essay called, you know, my Censored My New Genitals Won't Make Me Happy. And his argument is, you know, if I go through this, you know, this bottom surgery, this, you know, vaginoplasty, I'm going to be in worse health. You know, I'm going to have to do a lot of very unpleasant maintenance on this new orifice I've been given. And I may well become mentally less healthy, too. There's, you know, often cases where people become more suicidal after, you know, after they have the surgery. And then it just. The. The essay takes this really diabolical turn where he says, but neither of those things are good reasons why I shouldn't be able to do it, because I want it. And my. My desire and my happiness are totally independent agents of one another. And Spencer Clavin, who was. Who was kind enough to write a blurb for my book, I sent him this essay, and we were talking about it, and he said to me, I think that's the definition of hell, actually, is when your desires are so. Are completely divorced from your. Your eudaimonia, from your flourishing, from what is proper to you, from what your purpose is. You know, that's when there's no. That's when there's no redemption left for you. That's when you've totally separated yourself from. From God and from any hope of. Of being what you're. You're made to be.
- [22:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. Yeah. You know, the. The mind moves from grammar to logic to rhetoric. Like, we have to understand our terms before we can apply them. And then we can actually, you know, talk about them. And so, you know, one of the things that you talk about in your introduction that I think is heavily tied in here is the concept of freedom, of liberty. Do we actually have the proper grammatical understanding of what that word actually means and what you just Described, which is horrific. And you know, as an aside, you know, that's not medicine. And the butchers that practice that and pull in broken people to perform whatever that is, that butchery, I mean, it's demonic. It really is. And to prey upon people like that, I mean, I don't think our society really grasps the depravity of that. But if you look at the individual themselves and what you articulated there, that misunderstanding of freedom, I mean, it's really a Luciferian understanding of freedom. Right? It is, it is that strict autonomy we talked about earlier. That man then is divorced from the entire cosmos. Nothing actually informs him on who he should be. There's no nature, there's no history, there's no God, there's no church, there's no faith. He really is just this completely free. Free and scare quotes creature that's malleable, you know, to his own self creation. And so I think, you know, can we talk about freedom for a second? Because my, as I've wrestled with this, it seems like on the modern side when we say freedom we mean like a plurality of options associate my desire. Like the more options I have to do what I want, the more free I am. And if someone impedes on that, then it's tyrannical. Right. We all scream about our rights, but that, that's not how the tradition looks at freedom. Right. How does the tradition look at freedom? What should we, what should we think of freedom?
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Grayson Quay
Yeah, I think you're right about it being Luciferian. Like it's my. We were talking about this before we started recording, but my original title for the book was the Serpent's Promise. Because I think that, you know, Ye shall be as gods in the. In the Garden is really the original transhumanist manifesto. Yeah, I think our, our conception of, of freedom is, is really broken. Like you have, you know, you, you have the famous Supreme Court decision where it's like at the heart of freedom is, is the ability to sort of choose one's own conception of the mystery of human life or something like that. Yeah. So freedom, you know, I think the definition I use is being unencumbered in the, you know, pursuit of the flourishing proper to, to yourself to what. To what you are. And I think that, you know, that doesn't need to be frightening because it doesn't mean that everyone has to follow the same sort of cookie cutter path. Obviously everyone is different and has different gifts and to flourish and to be a good person involves, you know, following those and developing those and expressing those in different and unique and beautiful ways. You know, not every good chair looks the same. Not every. Not every good life looks the same, you know, so there's an immense amount of freedom within that. What there isn't freedom to do is choose your own telos. You know, an oak acorn, I think I say in the book, an oak acorn can't just decide it wants to be a blueberry bush, Right?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Your freedom seems to be then tethered according to your nature. Right? What is the teleology of your nature? What's its purpose? You know, man's rational animal, you know, what is the aim of our actual existence? And then our freedom then. Right. Seems to be oriented towards that. I think one thing that we don't really understand as moderns is that, you know, the ancient concept of freedom is that freedom is actually the capacity to choose what is good. And as you say, there might be a legitimate plurality to what that good is. Right. We're called the different types of goods, if you will, not in a relativistic way, but we're called to play out different types of vocations. Right. We have different capacities, but this freedom is always then within the bounds of our own human nature. And we're called to actually seek after these goods. And we have an appetite, right. We have this will, we have this freedom to actually seek that good. And I think it's something that's like really lost on us now because if you constantly talk about. We constantly, as a culture talk about freedom all the time, right? I'm not free or this is now fascist or this is tyrannical because it stops me from having certain rights. And it' just one of those words kind of like love that we have just completely gutted and it doesn't really mean anything anymore. You know, one thing, though, it's already kind of haunted our conversation a little bit. But can you just say a little bit about technology? Why are so many of the discussions around transhumanism always tethered to technology? And why is technology making it or seemingly making it so much worse?
- [26:59]
Grayson Quay
Well, because I think that the technology, the, you know, this, this anthropology has been awaiting has finally arrived. Like, we finally sort of for the first time just in the last several decades, have the tools to take these, you know, these bold assertions of. Of radical human freedom untethered from any sense of teleology, and to make them a reality to say, like, okay, let's have the courage of our convictions. If, you know, if. If God is dead, if existence precedes essence. If all these things are true, then why shouldn't I, you know, why shouldn't I change my. Why shouldn't I try to change my sex through. Through surgeries and hormones? Why shouldn't I try to enhance my performance with, you know, cybernetics or by implanting something into my brain or something like that? It's, you know, there's no. There's no more guardrail around. There was no philosophical guardrail already around doing this, and now there's no practical guardrail to prevent it either. And I think this is what CS Lewis sort of sensed at the very beginning of the era with. With the abolition of man, is that humanity can now be treated as a raw material on which the human will can operate, which just reduces everything to. To whims, because that will no longer has any. Any standard of flourishing it can aim at. It's just what you have the power to do and what you have the will to do. And the way it's often sold with technology is that this is what you can do to yourself. This is. These are all the options for what you can become, if you wish to become this thing. It's. It's presented as individual empowerment. But I think what Lewis was on to is that the conquest of man by nature. Sorry, the conquest of nature by man, I think he says, always ends up to be the conquest of some men by other men. And in this case, you know, you. He talks about this. This sort of cast of controllers who have control over this, and it sounds very like, shadowy and dystopian and everything. And then you step back and you go, well, okay, we're, you know, we're supposed to, like, start living a significant portion of our lives in the metaverse or whatever. I don't make the metaverse. I. I don't, you know, write its laws. I don't design its. Its esthetics or its physics or its rules or its community standards or whatever. That's the. The world of Mark Zuckerberg. I'm stepping into where he is God, and he shapes, you know, he shapes everything in this way. And if you want to live in this virtual reality, if you want to be a transhuman being who exists more and more in cyberspace and identifies more and more with this avatar instead of this body, that's not something you have total agency or control over and that, you know, and then even with something like transgenderism, like, there's a pretty well established social contagion element to this, where people who were, you know, young kids who are vulnerable to peer pressure and who might have other, you know, mental health challenges are drawn into this because they see influencers or they see classmates. So this is the kind. And then obviously you have this whole industry that's making a large amount of money on this and now has a vested stake in promoting this ideology as something positive and admirable and beautiful and, and praiseworthy and desirable. So, yeah, people are, you know, there. There may be the illusion of individual choice in many of these cases, but this is something that's going to be foisted on us. And as it becomes now it's an. It's an option, but soon it'll become an expectation that you're able and willing to augment or alter yourself in order to fit society's expectations, will no longer build societal institutions and things to fit people will cut people to fit those institutions. And if you refuse to do that, you'll find yourself slowly excluded and frozen out of public life more and more and more. I think that's something we. We have to prepare for.
- [31:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Very well said. Yeah. A few thoughts there. One is Man. Abolition of man is such an excellent text. It is so good. If someone's listening right now and you haven't read that, it's short, it's by C.S. lewis. It's excellent. Like, it's. It's a coffee shop read, but it's a. It's a wonderful mapping of modernity. And to your point. Yeah. One of the things that I learned there was that there are no true relativists. People are only relative about the values and virtues that they want to destroy. And then there are absolutists about the ones that they want to implement. Right. So when these, when we see these kind of relativist ideologies that pop up, they're always corrosive, typically, to traditional ideas, but they're not truly relative as where there's no truth, there's just some truth that they want to replace it with. Right. You can usually find out, you know, you can figure out pretty quickly what those are by, you know, what their own blasphemies and sacred things are that they aren't willing to actually, you know, transgress. And I like what you said, too, because I want to push into that about technology, because it's. Technology is all around us. It's something that's ubiquitous. I don't know if we talk about it enough, but kind of reading your work and listening to tonight, you know, it really seems like at least a preliminary understanding is like, what is the moral framework for technology. And it really seems like a teleology rooted in our nature is a good start. Right? Does this technology actually help restore by nature or even like perfect it, or is it contrary to it? And one thing I would ask you that I was kind of contemplating this morning as I was rereading your text, is it might be. It's easy maybe to point out to certain transhuman examples, right. And say, you know, we've had several tonight. But in certain ways, do you think that our culture overall is becoming transhuman and in ways that maybe like even you or I aren't even really aware of? And my, my thought process here is that technology seems to always make a claim upon man. So whether it's not, whether it's the Bronze Age and all of a sudden we have bronze swords, like, that changes things. It changes warfare, it changes glory. You think of the Iliad changes certain things. Like every technological shift that we've had seems to make certain claims upon how, like, who man is and how he lives in society and today. You know, I mean, think about, think about the fact that my iPhone has had on my own intellect and my brain and my nature and how I'm addicted to it and I reach for it, you know, perfunctory, without even thinking. Think about how social media has warped things. And so do you think that. Because I don't want to just like, point fingers at others, but it's not what I'm saying you're doing, but I'm kind of critiquing myself here. I don't want to just point fingers at others and say, look at them, they're struggling. This ideology, man, this seems to be something that's in the water. Like there's this like transhumanism that's just like bubbling to the surface. And every new thing we have, like, whether it's meta, any social media, now they have goggles that you wear that just like bring up things no matter where you're walking. Like, it seems like all of that is making certain claims upon our identity as man and trying to, I guess, use this word, trans us to something else. Something else than what we actually are designed to be.
- [34:40]
Grayson Quay
Yeah, I think it's. I think it's good to be self reflective. And I tried to do that in the book a little bit. Like, I. I think that my phone, you know, it feels, many days, it feels a lot more like a sort of organ that I happen to carry around in my hand. Like a sort of sense organ that helps Me perceive, you know, the sort of visual. The sort of virtual world around me. The same way my eyes perceive light and my ears perceive sound waves. It's. And, you know, when you leave it somewhere, it's like you've forgotten one of your five senses. There's just a whole sphere of reality you can't tap into. And, you know, people become anxious when they don't have their phones, which is such a strange thing, when they didn't, you know, they didn't exist 20 years ago. But, yeah, I think that, you know, what you said is there. The, you know, technology always makes a claim on us. And that's something that I deal with. I don't want to give away too much of my book, but my last section is on religion, and it gets real weird. So I hope everyone who reads it will enjoy it. But one of the things I talk about is I go into some of the Enochic literature, you know, the Book of Enoch, where it sort of zooms in on the. The kind of pre. Pre flood history from Genesis with, you know, the sons of God and the. The daughters of men joining in marriage and being giants in the earth and everything like that. And, you know, Kane's line, building a city. And then them. It's mentioned that they develop these technologies, whether to make musical instruments or, you know, discovering new forms of metalworking and things like that. And the way that that's presented in the anarchic literature is actually that the sons of God and daughters of men are couplings of fallen angels with women. The legit. The, you know, actual logistics of that are never made entirely clear, but that they produce these, you know, these sort of transhuman beings, these kind of superhuman beings or demigods, you would say, in Greek mythology that are referred to as the Nephilim, and that, you know, these people became kind of warlords and they were sort of advised and visited by these fallen angels who had, in many cases, sired them, who taught them these technologies, like, who taught them sort of different forms of divination and weapon making and all these other things that gave them power that they could then wield to. To dominate and tyrannize other people. One funny little thing in the Book of Enoch is one of the technologies they're given is cosmetics. I think that specifically says, like eyeshadow. So there you go. Makeup is, you know, demonic technology. But it's, you know, it's sort of the. It kind of reminds me of that bit in the Iliad where you have the. The arming scene with hera. But it's her, like, putting on makeup to go seduce Zeus, but it's presented as like a putting on armor type scene. That's just sort of her equivalent, like seduction is sort of the equivalent of. Of domination for men. I. So I. Yeah. Anyway, from all this, I just kind of infer that. I think there is something that the, the tradition is warning us of that the, the sort of Judeo Christian tradition is warning that, you know, the, these demonic forces do introduce technologies to us to induce us to destroy ourselves. And, you know, if you take that reading of kind of the pre flood narrative, the, the Anakic details that are added in there, then what God's doing with the flood is basically knocking us back to an earlier level of technological development, is washing away all of those technologies that were given before the Flood. And then you have the same thing at the Tower of Babel, where, you know, again, they're scattered there. You know, God winds the clock back on technology and because he sees that humanity is reaching a point at which they'll destroy themselves, each other, the world around them. All the above. Take your pick. And I think we're starting to approach a moment like that again.
- [38:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's very reminiscent of Dante. Like, all of a sudden you're. You're going down into the pit of hell and you've. You've gone past some, like, very depraved sins, sins that we would obviously think are very heinous. And all of a sudden you run into the alchemists. We're like really like the guys that are trying to turn, you know, some other metal into gold. They're way down here in the eighth circle of hell. And I think one of the things that Dante is getting there is exactly what you said, is that there's a certain point in which technology, within an obsession of being able to control nature, starts to push into the demonic and look to the demonic for the reception of that type of power that it actually craves. This kind of goes back to the relativist example, right? That it's actually a power dynamic. They're not actually truly relativists. They're simply trying to destroy one type of hierarchy and implement another one. And it's amazing how many of these kind of facades crumble into basically different types of power dynamics. You know, earlier though, you mentioned Nietzsche. You mentioned kind of his famous, like, God is dead statement. How does that play into this kind of transhumanist conversation?
- [40:09]
Grayson Quay
Yeah, it's. It's sort of. It's an attempt. It's An A chat. It's kind of a challenge thrown in people's faces. Obviously, it would be nonsense to say that, you know, a literal existing deity has literally passed away, but what he's saying is that the. The whole concept of. Of teleology no longer makes sense. The idea that, you know, there is some inherent meaning or some connection or some thread that runs through the cosmos in this way is not the case. Your, you know, any moral values you think you hold are all historically conditioned, are all the product of cultural forces. They have no connection to any kind of objective reality. This is, you know, anything that you thought you got from God, whether it was a moral code or a sense of belonging in the universe or a sense of who you are and what your purpose is, none of that is real. So what are you going to wake up and do tomorrow now? And for him, it's this, you know, it's this challenge of like, make yourself a. An Uber mention over man and then. Or, you know, becoming last man. Become, you know, one of these kind of pathetic creatures who just seeks comfort and doesn't want to be bothered and doesn't want to think too hard about anything or face up to any challenges. And I think, interestingly, you have a kind of transhuman temptation facing both of them. One is, you know, for an ubermensch, it's make. How do I make myself into a superhuman or a superman? And then for the other one, it's how do I kind of relieve myself of the burdens of being human as opposed to transcending human limitations? Like, how can I just sort of deaden myself in some way? Whether that's by, you know, escaping into a virtual world or by, you know, breaking down the barrier between a human and a machine by making AI your girlfriend or your best friend and just having this relationship where you're constantly, you know, affirmed and loved and flattered. And know this, you know, AI construct you're talking to never pushes back on you or has a bad day or, you know, needs you to. Needs you to rub its back when you're. You would rather be doing something else.
- [42:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I was. I was recently at a legal conference, and our ethics portion was actually on AI. And one of the things they pointed out to the bunch of attorneys is that AI is designed to please you. It's designed to be, you know, pleasurable to use. And so it was showing all these things of, you know, where it would tell you that you're. Because these are lawyers that are using AI behind the scenes. It's telling Them like they're, oh, yeah, this is a great argument or like this is a great case or whatever, and it's flattering them. But actually, it's not actually a good argument or the case doesn't even exist that, that it's given you. Right. So no, it brings in like this. Yeah. What ends up happening, right, is that there's like these artificialities that serve as a veneer over what's actually real. And the problem is with technology is that we seem to just simply be stacking them one on top of the other. In which now, like Plato's cave, right. Instead of ascending out of the cave, we're digging a hole, right. We're going down. Right. We're actually creating more layers of these artificialities that we actually have to navigate out of. And one of the things that I appreciate about the Parable of the Madman and Nietzsche's conversation about that God is dead, you know, one thing I've always been sensitive there too, is that he's trying to explain to all these like pious, you know, Lutherans that they've killed God. And I've always appreciated that because there's also, I think with this kind of transhumanism, there's like a practical atheism that kicks in. Right. So I might believe in God, I might even say I'm Christian. I do all these things, but my actual actions and how I treat my own humanity, really, actually my actions tell me that there is no God, that I don't believe in a creator, that I actually am the creator of my own life. You go back to Justice Kennedy's famous or infamous statement, right, about the mystery of life and our self creation. And so this is what I'm concerned about, and I think your book draws out really well, is like how this transhumanism is just kind of seeping into the culture as a whole. And we might be able to look at very distilled examples and say, oh yeah, that's bad. But technology is making certain transhumanist claims upon us, even just in our daily life. And all this stuff is getting integrated, whether it's in the workspace or just the family or, you know, for those of us who have kids. I feel like is a constant battle to keep screens away from my children. They don't have screens at my house. We really push away those. We go to a little classical school that doesn't have screens. And still they're always around, they're begging for attention, begging to kind of rewire your brain. And it just seems to Be the culture now that we're just saturated in.
- [45:12]
Grayson Quay
Yeah. Well, one thing I say in the book is that I think if you're fighting this battle on your own, if it is just a question of, you know, well, I, I, you know, and maybe my immediate nuclear, you know, household family will set, will make decisions about how we're going to use technology. It's a mismatch. It's you and your self control and whatever, you know, oversight you were able to exercise over your children versus these, the smartest people in the world are recruited to work at these companies making apps. And these apps are designed. You know, I feel like I'm describing the one ring with one to, to, to destroy the world of men. Right. These, these apps are just, these apps are designed to trigger your dopamine receptors to, to addict you. You know, it's, it's an intentionally addictive product. And so to put, you know, one person's, if you're talking about like keeping screens away from kids, like letting kids have real embodied childhoods where they run around and play and, you know, get some bruises and scrapes and are embodied human beings as opposed to these sort of virtual transhumans that, where most of the meaningful interactions in their life are mediated through these, these, these screens and these apps in which they're discarnated, in which they're not being and expressing themselves fully as embodied incarnate human beings. If you want to, if you want that for your child, if you want to spare them from that transhuman fate, it's asymmetrical warfare. It's you versus, you know, it's you versus Silicon Valley. So that's one reason, you know, I have a whole chapter where I go through these questions as political issues and I examine how they've been sort of processed through American politics in recent years. And one of the things I really come out strongly for is states and you know, potentially federally allowing some kind of age restriction on social media or on smartphone use altogether. I think it would be incredible if we could just ban anyone under 16 from using a smartphone. The same way we would ban them from smoking cigarettes.
- [47:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I mean, it really is. I mean, I don't, I mean, who's, I mean, it's becoming more common now to go out to a restaurant and look at the table next to you and there's some 12 year old kid out to dinner with his parents and he has headphones on and is staring at an iPad.
- [47:58]
Grayson Quay
Yeah.
- [47:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And their brain is just melting. We're just turning these kids into like, little iPad blobs that can't even function. Or you see this in. I saw this recently traveling in an airport in which it's. A lot of times it's literally like getting someone addicted to cocaine and then holding their cocaine back to get them to behave and do certain things. Right? So it's like the kids, you know, the kid misbehaves, they take the iPad away, and the response is that of an addict. Right. It's just like a manic breakdown. It's like, okay, well, you have to do X, Y and Z or I'm not giving this thing back to you. And like, what is that doing to our human nature? What does that do to the brain to have that constant rewiring in it? And it's. Yeah, it's just simply become ubiquitous in our culture. And I like what you say about the realism, you know, in my family, like, you know, we've tried. It is asymmetrical warfare. But, like, we're in the rural areas. My kids are playing outside. They. They go fishing. We have ponds. We've got chickens that they take care of and ducks and things. Things that are just real. They go. And I liked what you said earlier is, like, particularly children, like, are there memories that they're making mainly predicated upon, like, artificialities, like digital things or on things that are real. Right. Are they remembering family dinner with their parents or grandparents? Are they going out on walks at night? Right. Or in the evenings? You know, when's the last time they actually went out and just played outside? I mean, these are things that are really simple. It's not. They're simple, but it's not always easy. I mean, even myself, right. Sometimes I want to come home and collapse and just, you know, doom scroll on X. Right. My brain is. Is done for the day, but then they just sit there and watch me do that. So it is asymmetrical. And I appreciate you. You saying that.
- [49:31]
Grayson Quay
And there's a. There's a really, I think, misguided libertarian, you know, impulse that I delve into a little bit in the book of this idea of, oh, well, the. The state shouldn't think it's a better parent than you. And as a. As a general principle, sure, that's fine. But in this case, I think that, you know, with the mismatch that we're seeing, I think families can use all the help they can get. And I think that one totally valid use of state power is to position itself to shield families from the predations of the market, which Comes back to the question of what the purpose of our political order is. Is it to protect a particular vision of human flourishing, or is it simply to maximize individual autonomy?
- [50:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing there too, is, I mean, even from, like, a common good example, because I agree with you that a very atomized understanding of our anthropology is not sufficient to push back against this type of predation. So, I mean, one way you look at it is, like, what. What kind of citizens are we raising, right, if these people get up and can't function? Like, these are the people that you want on juries. These are the people that you want voting on things about laws and things like that that are easily manipulated through technologies and are addicted and have an attention span that's not more than what now? 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 10 seconds. It just keeps going down, right? I mean, we can't read a book anymore. I mean, in the. In the church, you know, sometimes we talk to parents. It's like you put these kids in front of these iPads or these video games all day long, all the time to get them behave, and then you take them to mass, and it's an hour of sitting and. And listening. And the things are very real around you, right? It engages all the senses. There's incense. There's all these things to bring you in. But if your brain is just simply melted, like, how are they supposed to function? Like, how are you setting them up to success, to actually engage not only in the natural, but the supernatural that's there when the brain itself can't even function? How is that? I mean, because you point out, obviously, that you don't hide your faith in the book. So maybe, like one argument is, is that if you allow these things to, you know, transhumanize you and really start to create a certain level of privation in your nature, then how disposed is your nature to grace? How. How disposed is your nature to actually receiving the grace that God has for you if you actually kind of smother it?
- [52:02]
Grayson Quay
Yeah, I mean, that's sort of a thorny question that I come to at the end of the book is like, I'm not. I don't know that I'm sort of enough of a Thomist or whatever to. To really answer this. But if, you know, if you. If you take Athanasius formulation seriously, God became man, that man might become God, that, you know, Christ affects this. This change in human nature and that, you know, by grace we can become what he is by nature, then it really raises the question of, like, you know, Christ did not come to save gorillas or cheetahs or watermelons or anything else in the way that he saved humanity because he became human. He didn't become any of those other things. So if you make yourself no longer human, I think there is very much a risk of placing yourself outside of the category of being which Christ's, you know, incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension actually, you know, redeems and, and brings to salvation. I'm. I have no idea where you would, where that line would be drawn. I mean, obviously I don't. I hope that having a smartphone doesn't do it for me, but it doesn't put me outside of grace. But I think you, you have to acknowledge that if you take the incarnation seriously and kind of the theology around the idea of theosis seriously, you have to acknowledge that there's a point at which, you know, maybe you could place yourself outside of humanity.
- [53:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, well, there's, there's an interesting concept in Christianity with sanctification, theosis, et cetera, that as we become closer to God, we become more ourselves. And this is not always the true in religions, right? There's a lot of religions that the more you draw close, you ascend to the divine. There's an emptying of yourself, you become less yourself. And the one, the particular kind of gets absorbed or absolved and melted into the divine. Christianity is unique insofar as that we actually teach that. No, no, no, right. The more that Grayson Quay draws towards Jesus Christ, the more that Grayson becomes Grayson. Right? It's more of who you are. So, no, the more then that you would engage in acts that would actually, you know, harm your nature and your capacity, you're actually becoming less of yourself, becoming less of a human, but also less of yourself and damaging your capacity then to be open to God's grace. I mean, these things like reality, whether we like it or not, right? Reality is this dance between nature and grace. And some of these things that I think, we think are very mundane, you know, whether it's. It's just my phone or social media or etc. We do have to realize in a lot of ways they do make us deaf to the def. To the divine. Right? They do make us deaf to the divine. It's difficult then to hear that still quiet voice calling us to become more ourselves if we're constantly in this like really loud environment that's constantly entertaining our brain.
- [55:14]
Grayson Quay
Sorry. I love what you said about being more yourself because I think there is this like perpetually adolescent quest for identity and authenticity. That we have today and that we're going in precisely the wrong direction with that, you know, in light of that idea. But I think that's another thing that is so frightening about the. The growth of these transhumanist technologies is that they take an idea that was already there, a cultural tendency that was already there, and they just turbocharge it. You know, now they can sell you, you know, they can sell you a new shirt or new glasses frames or a new haircut that they'll be able to sell you a new face or a new personality. There's a. Yeah, there's a sci fi novel I. I quote in the. The book that's really good. I quote a lot of science fiction novels. And this just, like, gave me an excuse to really nerd out. But there's one I quoted called Blind Sight. I think it's from 2006. That's very good that there's There's a. Sorry, let me say there's a. There's a thing you can get where you can get kind of neurological tweaks in the book, in. In your brain that just alter your personality or your tastes in some way. And people who are in romantic relationships just spend all their time nagging each other to get tweaks where it's like, you don't like the same movies. Okay. Just go get a tweak. So you like these movies, and then we can watch them together. Okay. It's just a really nightmarish thing.
- [56:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. There seems to be a very unholy trinity between our modern anthropology that is focused so much on this, like, Luciferian autonomy. And then you have technology and the technology we have now, which seems to then kind of make real these kind of nightmare understandings of who we are as a person. Right. We can actually kind of give flesh to some of these just depraved understandings of humanity. And then the third one is capitalism, that you commodify these things and package them and sell them, the vulnerable people. And that's. It's again, like you said, that asymmetrical warfare pushing back against this has to be intentional. You have to be intentional to push back against this. But one of the things that you mentioned kind of towards the end of your introduction that I thought was fascinating that I did not know, is that this. This term to transhumanize. Right. This transhumanism. This. Transhumanize is not actually a new word. Can you talk a little bit about, like, where this word first pops up?
- [57:42]
Grayson Quay
Yeah. This is so cool. So I'LL I'll start with kind of the modern definition and then go back to the. The old one. But. So it's first used in its modern definition by Julian Huxley, who was. He wrote this essay in 1957, just called Transhumanism. He was head of the British Eugenics Society, which gives you a sense of where this movement was from the very beginning. Julian Huxley, interestingly, is the brother of Aldous Huxley, who writes Brave New world in the 1930s, which is this incredible statement of what a transhuman world would look like. And I think, you know, in the character of John the Savage gives you this idea of someone who is outside of that transhuman world and literally lives on a reservation. And people come and gawk at him because he's just sort of this stubborn, mere human. But, yeah, as I was researching this, I find out it's much older. It shows up in Dante's Paradiso. The. The line in which it appears is trasumanar significance. That's how my wife talks. She's a Todd. But, you know, to transhuman our significa, right, to. To symbolize the idea of being transhumanized in words failed me like I was. I was unable to express what it meant. Dante is saying to be transhumanized. And then that really got me thinking is that we. What we have essentially is a conflict between two rival transhumanisms. Because Satan wasn't lying, per se, when he said, you'll be as. You'll be like gods. Because that was, you know, that was God's plan for us all along. You know, sons of the resurrection are equal to the angels, right? This was always the plan for us. The question was, do we sort of conform ourselves to our proper end? Do we sort of conform to an existing. Existing standard of what humanity is called to be and was made to be? Or do we try to. And. And sort of ascend to our destiny in that way, or do we try to seize it for ourselves and on our own terms? And I think that's what's happening now with. With transhumanism. And I think that's, you know, goes all the way back to the garden. And that's why I think the. This temptation is really a continuation of the original temptation that's. That's always faced the human race. I think Satan was the first transhumanist.
- [60:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I really. I really like the picture of these two competitive, kind of like transhumanizing forces, right? There's this demonic and there's this Divine. Both which are actually pulling on this human nature. One is a perfection of it, a completion of it, if you will, if you want to use those terms. And the other one is a warping of it, some type of disordered right now. I like that a lot. And I really. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating when I was reading your book. And again, your book is kind of a tour de force of great books and great authors. And so when Dante popped up, you know, I paid attention. It's like, oh, wow. Really? That term's there? And that's. That's a. Fascinating about how he's using it. So I appreciate you putting that in there, kind of like, as a. A last thought, Grayson, like, what. What do you really hope people get out of your book? Like, what would you really want people to take away when they read it?
- [61:25]
Grayson Quay
I want people to. I think I say this in my acknowledgment section at the very end. I just. I want people to come away with this idea of transhumanism as a lens that they can apply to, you know, the technologies that they encounter as we're, you know, in this era of constant, you know, rapid technological development of the, you know, the choices that they face in really, you know, foundational life situations, like starting a family or like, navigating end of life care for a loved one, you know, and thinking about. About voting and their. Their purchasing and the decisions they make with money and in the way that they're choosing to worship and to kind of what to pray for and how to look at the sort of spiritual landscape around them. I think that in all of these areas, thinking in terms of transhumanism can be really helpful. Thinking in terms of, like, okay, is this particular use of this technology or this particular instance of something else an example of trying to substitute some other telos for humanity, of trying to just sort of impose my will in this situation using technology and to sort of limitlessly expand my desires and. And fulfill them for myself? Or is this an opportunity where I can think like, okay, what is my. Who am I? What is my telos? What is my purpose? And how. What would be the virtuous thing to do in accord with that? You know, how would I use this technology? Would I use it at all?
- [63:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you've got to. You've got to, you know, name the demon before you exercise it. Right? I think your. I think your book does a really good job of starting to actually help people articulate a problem. Right? So it's hard to actually solve a problem. If we can't actually articulate it. So we can actually kind of map it, we can articulate it. We can look at how it's affecting every area of our life, maybe in ways that we don't really expect. Maybe we think we're kind of shielded from these things, but if we self reflect, we realize things are making claims on us as well. And even, like, you know, are we the people that we're charged with, like a father over his family, like, are we helping to save our families right, from these kind of influences that can really creep in and seem mundane at times? So I think you've given us a very challenging work. Again, I think you're a wonderful writer. I think reading your text is like being introduced to an entire library of great books. Obviously, on this podcast, we very much applaud that and appreciate that. So where can people pick up the book and also find out more about you?
- [64:07]
Grayson Quay
I want to say I'm very flattered by that. I remember I've had that thought about some other books I've read where I'm like, wow, if I just read every book you mentioned, I would have an excellent education here. But, yeah, so my book's available at the Sofia Institute Press website. I would prefer you buy it there because I get more royalties that way. But if you'd like, you could also buy it at Barnes and Noble's website or on Amazon. An audiobook is also available. If you hate my voice, don't worry, I didn't narrate it. I very much asked not to do that. And, yeah, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at Hemingway. H E M I N G Q U A Y. And that's. That's sort of my most active social media there. And then, you know, I write for different websites now and then, but best way to find me there is just. Just to Google my name. Thankfully, I have a very unique name, so most of the results that come up are. Are actually me.
- [65:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, now, we've talked about that before. I. I think you sound like the. The character in a British novel. You have a great name. You rival. I have another friend. She's popular online. She's been on the podcast Tish Oxenrider, who I also think needs to be a character and a British novel. You guys just have excellent, excellent names. So, again, Grayson, thank you so much for joining us today and telling us about your book.
- [65:27]
Grayson Quay
Thank you for having me taken.
- [65:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All right, everyone. Again, that is the transhumanist temptation. How technology and ideology are reshaping humanity and how to resist, go buy it at Sophia Press. And then next week, you know, guys, if you want to be able to grow up and be like Grayson and write wonderful books that are entrenched in the great books themselves, then you need to read them. So next week, we actually kick off our studies on Plato with an introduction episode. And then we'll have two episodes on the dialogue. First, Alcibiades, a somewhat neglected, forgotten dialogue, but actually it was the traditional first dialogue. Students of Plato would read a dialogue centered on the principle of know thyself. So check out our website for our reading schedule, and we want you to join us, and we will see you next week. Thank you, Sam.