Orthodoxy, Antichrist and Transhumanism: Does Peter Thiel Have a Point?

No.

We live today in a time when our relationship to the body and the nature of the soul is under a strange kind of questioning. With science, medical advancement, artificial intelligence and their relationship to the individualism that has rather haplessly emerged in the modern West, the possibility of whether we could employ science and technology to alter ourselves according to increasingly transhuman ideals asks some pretty weird questions.

These questions are perhaps expressed in a very strange interview Ross Douthat conducted with tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The discussion was largely around the issue of why technological, scientific and medical advancement seems to be stagnant, until about halfway through it turned to some topics Thiel has some wild views on: transhumanism and the antichrist.

Peter Thiel is a Christian, he has said before he believes literally in the resurrection, yet he seems to have a sufficiently strong view of free will that he also believes God has no role in history, and more importantly that we do, and that we should use this will in the name of transhumanism, so much so that we may even leave behind our own species. In a now viral part of the conversation, while discussing AI and its possible effects on our species Douthat asks:

Douthat: “You prefer the human race to endure”

Thiel: “Erm”

Douthat: “You’re hesitating, yes?”

Thiel: “I would…I would…”

Douthat: “This is a long hesitation, should the human race survive?”

Thiel: “Er…yes. But…but erm…you know, yeah, transhumanism. This idea was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say the trans people in a sexual context: transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses, a transexual is someone who change a penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work, but we want more transformation than that, the critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, man it’s so pathetically little. We want more than cross dressing or being able to change your sex organs, we want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, Orthodoxy Christianity by the way has this critique of this that these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body but you need to transform your whole self.”

What is interesting about Thiel’s vision is that his transhumanism, as opposed to its many iterations in the modern world is according to him, ‘Christian.’ Thiel mentions the Orthodox church as supporting this idea, and he raises something else as an opposition to the progress necessary for it: the antichrist.

According to Thiel, one of the problems of recent decades and the apparent technological and scientific stagnation our societies have faced is that we are constantly threatened by a looming apocalypse, be it technological or environmental. He believes this threat is not the threat, but exactly the threat the antichrist would use to scare people into producing what it wants, which is Thiel’s main concern: a single world government.

Thiel sites 1 Thessalonians 5:3 (“For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”) to suggest that we have somehow been pacified in recent times into a need for peace and safety that has made us risk averse, hindered progress and led to increasingly globalised regulations, something he deems as sufficiently wicked that he is willing to apply the term antichrist to express his concern for its potential.

Weirdly, Thiel has a point in citing the relationship between Orthodox thinkers and transhumanism, albeit a questionable one. One of the influences of the idea is found in Russian cosmism: Nikolai Fyodorov was an Orthodox thinker who furthered ideas about human’s use of scientific and technological developments to literally fulfil God’s plans for humanity, including the physical resurrection of the dead using science. This was taken seriously by people such as rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who believed if this really happened we would need rockets to make space on the planet, hence its weird influence on early Soviet rocket science.

Yet just because this strange vein runs through the cavern of Orthodox history, it doesn’t mean this technological ‘theosis’ is anything like the theosis understood by Orthodox believers, for whom theosis is not about bodily perfection in profane time but spiritual transformation into a sharing of God’s nature (a somewhat analogous but theologically distinct idea for protestants would be sanctification), after all, Jesus’ body was not physically transformed until after he died, and Christians are called to become like him spiritually in order to attain what he assures us physically, which is resurrection. Transhumanists like Brian Johnson and his longevity seeking goals are engaging in precisely the opposite of this discipline, seeking to sustain the body because of a fear of death, a long way from the bodily asceticism that has often characterised the lives of saints honoured by the Orthodox church.

Basically, Thiel is in a weird way making the same odd confusion of Russian cosmism, that instead of theosis being spiritual and about a lived moral transformation it is something that we conflate with the literal and engineer using the tools of science and technology. Instead of death losing its sting because of the eternal hope assured to us by the bodily resurrection of Christ, which Thiel claims to believe in, the hope of this kind of transhumanism would be rooted in a fear and avoidance of death and a babel-tower view of our own capability, not in an affirmation of Paul’s statement that to live is Christ and to die is gain. It seems like a conflation of Christianity with the exact same goal all the other billionaires seem to have: how to engineer themselves to live longer.

It’s not to say that Christians of any kind believe we should disregard the body. In Plato’s Phaedo, his account of Socrates deathbed discussion with his friends on the nature of the soul, Socrates argues the goal of philosophy is the renouncement of the body in favour of those aspects of the soul that are eternal, in Socrates’ view wisdom and the pursuit of the good. If you don’t, Socrates claims, you will be “nailed to the body” and end up hanging around your grave ultimately to be reborn in the cycles of reincarnation.

Jesus teaching of course shares in common with this the idea that we do pursue that which is eternal over that which is temporal, that we trade that which we can’t keep for that which we can’t lose, but unlike Socrates since Jesus’ view of what is truly eternal is moral, the end product of this is both a renouncement of the bodily but also an affirmation of it, a sense that to have concern for other’s bodily needs is an outward demonstration of moral transformation, of God’s Kingdom. Hence not only does Jesus heal the sick and feed the hungry as signs of his authority, he charges his disciples that they and we will be judged upon our treatment of ‘the least of these’: the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned.

But then there is Thiel’s odd idea about the antichrist. Whether or not a one world government may be concerning, this is simply nonsense. In one of the Louis Theroux documentaries Westboro baptist church members told Louis they had got together and were absolutely sure Obama was the antichrist, and Thiel’s projection of a political anxiety with a theological idea seems about as balanced, given that his argument rests on the idea that this is what environmentalism is being used for. He seems to think things like AI may provide us with answers rather than aiding said antichrist, and his association of Greta Thunberg with this apparent impending evil just seems bizarre. His complaint suggests that because the FDA is becoming a defacto global health regulator or that nuclear regulation has become more global are somehow evil, is not to me a sign of some satanic scheme but just a reflection that the progress he seems to oddly also demand produces a globalised and networked world in which these things simply are going to require at the very least global agreement and inevitable kinds of global regulation. The idea that any of this signals the antichrist seems no more justified than the claim that anything anxiety evoking would be the antichrist. Given brexit and booming American exceptionalism and increasing populist nationalism and even decreasing belief in the ideas of climate change in certain political quarters, the idea that the antichrist is about to use the threat of environmental apocalypse to bring about totalitarian global power seems nuts.

But then again, Thiel is not a historian or a theologian. Like Bill Gates or Elon Musk he is just another rich person who along with being rich gets to tell everyone what he thinks about stuff and his wealth creates an odd aura of authority that many people buy into. Thiel may describe himself as a Christian, but it seems in a lot of ways he is very theologically confused, and like most of those among the stupidly wealthy, increasingly concerned about his own mortality. If he took it seriously he might observe Christianity offers a hope beyond the shores of life, not a theology that justifies obsession with its artificial extension.

The question of transhumanism is an interesting one for believers then. Transhumanism blurs with basic improvements of body and mind that no one can disagree with, although the problem seems to come when we believe in the possibility of a fundamental overcoming of our own nature. Thiel suggests the Orthodox criticism of transgenderism is that it doesn’t go far enough, but surely instead it would be that it involves an attempt to play God rather than be united with God, a rejection of our nature and embodiment rather than a purifying of it. A man trying to become a woman does not achieve the leap but rather confuses his own nature, and as such it is not a transhuman improvement as much as a rejection of an inherent givenness, a reduction rather than an increase in order. A Christian might observe that no matter how powerful our ability to alter ourselves becomes, it is entirely meaningless without a grounding of that givenness in a self-understanding that gives our nature inherent meaning and a morally responsible attitude towards ourselves and others.