The Post-Human Parish
We sought to conquer nature but it wouldn't oblige.
To readers: This reflection is longer than usual. It comes from a collision I see around us and within us. It involves automated technology, personal integrity, changing faith, and dreams of power moving through politics from the American Bible Belt to Putin’s Russia and back to my childhood roots in Caracas. I would be grateful to know what you are seeing in your own corners of the world.
Human nature doesn’t change. We are what we are, and so we shall be. Wiser, still foolish. Moving forward, falling back. Reaching for the stars, stuck here on earth.
Artificial intelligence dazzles with promise beyond belief. Behind the glare of the screen, the creature staring back remains unchanged. We manufacture delusion driven by the same hunger, vanity, and fragile hope our ancestors knew. Everything we call culture and civilization, we built with the same body and brain.
Except.
That’s wrong. Geneticists studying historical DNA discovered something counterintuitive: civilization doesn’t stop human evolution; it accelerates it. We aren’t finished evolving. Culture and technology shape biology, including the ways we come to believe what we do. This isn’t destiny, but it isn’t dormant.
For decades, a fierce taboo policed this territory. After the horrors of Nazi racial science, caution hardened into dogma. By the 1990s, when political scientist Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve spilled out of lecture halls into the streets, the debate was defined by campus shutdowns, protests, and physical violence. I recall campus police surrounding the podium and dragging away protesters. The argument itself had become dangerous.
To maintain social peace, it was acceptable to admit genetic variation in the body—but not in the brain. Better to pretend the brain lived outside biology than to let intelligence become an excuse for discrimination.
Skin, metabolism, disease risk, immune response—yes. Temperament, cognition, behavior, the brain itself—no. That fiction has failed. Ancestry is not a racial prison, but neither is it biologically meaningless. It is a porous inheritance, shaped by history, environment, and chance. The brain is an organ, and organs evolve.
The true modern peril, however, is not the survival of old biological categories, but the engineering of entirely new ones. We are barreling toward a world where genetic editing, brain implants, and artificial selection may dictate what it means to be human—and, perhaps, what it means to live forever.
Nietzsche’s vision of the “will to power” and the super-human “Overman” puts modern “transhumanism” to shame, making Silicon Valley look small. What arrives is not the Overman, but the automation of Nietzsche’s “Last Man”: higher consciousness traded for optimized comfort, the machine turned into a more efficient cage.
Biological disparity will no longer be an accident of inheritance but a consequence of economic access. A high-tech caste system will give old prejudices new form.
Tired of every version of this cold material reality, global religion is breaking apart and on the move. The noisy headlines of Western Christian nationalism are a sideshow. The center of global faith has left the West behind, shedding dry political anxieties and gathering new energy across the Global South and Asia.
Not a rejection of tradition, but a recovery of its neglected depth: the holiness of life, the sanctity of creation, and the intensity of personal experience.
In places as different as Mississippi and Moscow, old religious establishments are cracking open. Top-down decrees matter less than local fervor. In the high-altitude barrios of Lima, the ancient machinery of Catholicism is being bypassed as millions embrace the ecstatic worship of Pentecostalism.
Across America’s Bible Belt, a world that has deeply shaped my own family, traditional denominational loyalty is collapsing as believers abandon historic mainlines for hyper-charismatic online networks outside clerical oversight.
I see this mutation in Venezuela, where I grew up. Old concrete plazas built for patron saints are drowned out by amplified late-night tent revivals of evangélicos rewriting the spiritual map of the hillsides. Some rage against immorality while accommodating, or even blessing, a corrupt regime, making American religious politics look almost restrained by comparison. Performative piety cloaks an anger keen to erupt.
Meanwhile, Eastern Orthodoxy stands apart, drawing believers toward ancient rites, mystical depth, and worship that feels received rather than manufactured. Its appeal is easy to understand beside much of Western Protestantism, where transcendent mystery has too often yielded to political therapy and committee meetings.
Yet, however sincere its devotion, this global retreat into the soul becomes, in its mass expression, a counterfeit rebellion. It disdains modern freedom while sheltering a rigid conformity that depends entirely on the state and chokes anyone who thinks differently. Everyone can sound as radical as they like so long as they stay put. On the other side, fundamentalism is not always a battle cry.
Autocrats understand the opportunity: as organic social bonds dissolve, a fractured and anxious populace comes to beg the state for order. This is the strongman’s trap, captured by Alexander Dugin, often called “Putin’s brain”: “The higher up and more authoritarian the ruler, the closer he is to the masses and the more stable his rule.”
This is the ultimate triumph of tyranny: to give the masses a chance to express themselves instead of a chance to claim their rights. People are free to rave and worship because that fervor never touches the actual distribution of power.
The promise of the technological frontier becomes an illusion: deeper imprisonment in material vanities under the guise of escape. Yet the persistent turn toward the emotional and mystical reveals the hard limits of a purely material world. Humanity cannot be engineered out of its longing for the transcendent.
The true peril is that new tools may be used to build a more efficient tyranny, mistaking a supreme artificial intelligence for a god.
Humanity’s origins were never merely material, and its destination was never something a machine could build.
The problem is not the vanity of human ambition, but the depth of human desire. Humanity is not meant merely to aspire to the infinite. It is made to participate in it—mixtures of dust and deity.
Notes and reading
Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life—Ferris Jabr (2024). An excellent journalistic overview of the idea that Earth is not simply an inanimate planet on which life evolved, but a living system continuously shaped by the organisms inhabiting it. Microbes, plants, and animals do not merely adapt to their environment; they alter it. (Shape it, not make it, leaving the broader question of consciousness open.)
Cultural Transmission and Evolution—Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman (1981). A foundational work in gene-culture theory by Cavalli-Sforza, a founder of modern human population genetics, and Feldman, a leading theorist of gene-culture coevolution.
“Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?”—On behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker (September 6, 2021).
Art and literature. Philip Rieff remains “the preeminent prophet of our psychological age,” foreseeing how modernity would trade salvation for therapy. See The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and the earlier modern classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.
Friedrich Nietzsche—For the “Overman” (Übermensch) and the “Last Man,” see the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Silicon Valley’s transhumanist project seeks to escape biological limits through technology, but risks engineering Nietzsche’s nightmare: the “Last Man,” a herd-like creature content with safety, predictability, and optimized comfort.
The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future—John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (2016), Part I/2. Milbank and Pabst argue for a postliberal alternative that joins economic egalitarianism to a renewed social conservatism, while rejecting prejudice against women, minorities, and the complications of actual human life. For how this upends contemporary left-right divides and market logic, see this discussion of Christian social vision at 53:00. One need not accept the whole argument to recognize how well it is made.
Eastern Orthodoxy—Many converts are drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy’s liturgical depth and the lifelong, mystical process of partaking in the divine nature, in contrast to more rationalized Western approaches to faith. See “Eastern Orthodoxy Gains New Followers in America,” Francis X. Rocca, The Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2023).
Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female—Bryce E. Rich (2023). Modern reactionary movements draw on Eastern Orthodox theology to build an idealized, highly gendered fortress against Western modernity. I’m new to this work. Critics may argue that Rich is too bound up with contemporary academic idiom, including queer theory. He earned his PhD in Theology at the University of Chicago and has participated in international conferences on Orthodoxy and sexuality. Cf. George Demacopoulos, “The ‘Orthodoxy as Masculinity’ Narrative,” Public Orthodoxy, November 22, 2025.
Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin—Michael Millerman (2022). Demonizing Putin makes him easier to hate and harder to understand. The East is rising, the West is faltering, and even Putin’s clearest weaknesses—a strained war economy and a fraying claim to competent domestic control—do not make him less dangerous.
Western elites long treated Alexander Dugin’s Eurasian civilizational project as fringe. Ukraine’s security services judged otherwise. In August 2022, a car bomb outside Moscow destroyed Dugin’s vehicle and killed his daughter, Darya—a brutal sign that his ideas were not merely academic. Millerman provides the definitive English-language treatment of Dugin’s philosophy, a project that triggered institutional backlash during his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto and helped lock him out of traditional academia for attempting a serious, fair treatment of Dugin’s Heideggerian framework.
Michael Millerman: Who is Alexander Dugin? (18:15). A sharp breakdown of Dugin’s core philosophy and mysticism.
Interview with Alexander Dugin (1:39:04). An essential discussion of civilizational studies, delivered in Dugin’s remarkably clear English.
René Char (from Leaves of Hypnos: A War Journal): “If man did not, from time to time, sovereignly close his eyes, he would finally be unable to see anything worth looking at.” Your post seems like such a sovereign act.
In my imagination, your invocation of limits and extremes reminds me of the end behavior of calculus graphs where “x approaches infinity.” It reminds me also of Frederick Douglass’s brilliant analysis of the Dred Scott decision, the last of what he describes as accelerating occurrences of national settlements of the slavery issue. The acceleration of such resolutions, he implies, demonstrates that no resolution is possible. The limits cannot hold.
Where I live, politics doesn’t feel lived. It becomes like most Americans’ perceptions of a faith: vaguely, insistently important but decidedly propositional and distant. Because of their perceived similarities, doomscrolling replaces devotions.
Great observation on tyranny as the masses’ chance—this is our man and our moment; use it or lose it!—to express themselves. There is no perceived procedure or process to act, so all true action is interruption of corrupt processes. Interruption brings hope.
René Char again: “How can you hide from what must be part of you? (Modernity gone astray.)”
So rich. Thank you.