The Post-Human Parish – by William C. Green

To our readers: This review is longer than usual. It stems from the conflicts we see around us and within us. It involves automated technology, personal integrity, changing faith, and dreams of power moving through politics, from America’s Bible Belt to Putin’s Russia and back to my childhood roots in Caracas. I hope you know what you’re seeing in your corner of the world.

Human nature remains the same. We are who we are and what we will always be. Even if you become wise, you are still foolish. Go forward and go backwards. I reached for the stars and stayed on this earth.

Artificial intelligence holds incredible promise. Beyond the glare of the screen, the creatures staring at us remain the same. We create delusions driven by the same hunger, vanity, and fragile hopes that our ancestors knew. Everything we call culture and civilization, we built with the same body and brain.

Exclude.

That’s wrong. Geneticists studying historical DNA have discovered something counterintuitive. Civilization does not stop human evolution. It accelerates. Our evolution is not finished yet. Culture and technology shape our biology, including how we believe we behave. This is not fate, but it is not asleep either.

For decades, intense taboos have been policed ​​in the region. After the horrors of Nazi racial science, vigilance solidified as dogma. By the 1990s, political scientist Charles Murray bell curve The debate that spilled from lecture halls to the streets was marked by campus closures, protests, and physical violence. I remember campus police surrounding the podium and dragging protesters away. The debate itself had become dangerous.

In order to maintain peace in society, genetic variations in the body were recognized, but genetic variations in the brain were not. Rather than using intelligence as an excuse for discrimination, it’s better to pretend that the brain lives outside of biology.

Skin, metabolism, disease risk, immune response—yes. Temperament, cognition, behavior, and the brain itself.no. The fiction failed. Ancestry is not a racial prison, but neither is it biologically meaningless. It is a porous heritage shaped by history, environment, and chance. The brain is an organ, and organs evolve.

But the real crisis of our time lies not in the survival of old biological categories, but in the engineering of entirely new biological categories. We are hurtling toward a world where gene editing, brain transplants, and artificial selection may define what it means to be human and, perhaps, what it means to live forever.

Nietzsche’s vision of the “will to power” and the superhuman “overman” puts contemporary “transhumanism” to shame and dwarfs Silicon Valley. What arrives is not the Overman, but the automation of Nietzsche’s “last man.” High consciousness was traded for optimized comfort, turning machines into more efficient cages.

Biological disparities will no longer be a coincidence of genetics, but will result from economic access. A high-tech caste system gives new forms to old prejudices.

Tired of all versions of this cold physical reality, the world’s religions are splitting and shifting. The noisy headlines about Western Christian nationalism are a sideshow. The global center of faith is leaving the West behind, dispelling dry political uncertainty, and gathering new energy across the Global South and Asia.

It is not a denial of tradition, but a restoration of the neglected depth of tradition: the sacredness of life, the sacredness of creation, and the intensity of personal experience.

Old religious sites are being destroyed in places as disparate as Mississippi and Moscow. Top-down legislation is less important than local aspirations. In the highlands of Lima, millions of people are embracing the ecstatic worship of Pentecostalism, and the ancient institutions of Catholicism are being bypassed.

Across America’s Bible Belt, a world that has deeply shaped my own family, traditional denominational loyalties are disintegrating as believers abandon the historical mainstream and move into hypercharismatic online networks outside of clerical oversight.

I see this mutation in Venezuela, where I grew up. The old concrete plaza built for the patron saint has been drowned out by the late-night tent revival efforts of evangelicals seeking to rewrite the spiritual map of the hillside. Religious politics in America seems largely subdued by comparison, as some people rage against immorality while condoning or celebrating corrupt regimes. Histrionic piety masks the anger that threatens to explode.

Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, stands out, drawing its followers to ancient rituals, mystical depth, and worship that feels accepted rather than manufactured. Its appeal is easy to understand compared to much of Western Protestantism, where transcendent mysteries are too often subjugated to political therapy and committee meetings.

But no matter how sincere its dedication, this global retreat into the soul becomes, in its popular expression, a false rebellion. It despises modern freedoms while protecting a rigid conformity that is completely dependent on the state and stifles those who think differently. Everyone can sound as extreme as they want as long as they stay put. On the other hand, fundamentalism is not necessarily a roaring battle cry.

Dictators understand this opportunity. As organic social bonds dissolve, a fractured and anxious populace begins to look to the state for order. This is the trap of the strong, captured by Alexander Dugin, often referred to as “Putin’s brain.” “The higher the status of a ruler and the more authoritarian he is, the closer he is to the masses and the more stable his rule.”

This is the ultimate victory of tyranny. It’s not about giving the masses a chance to claim their rights, it’s about giving them a chance to express themselves. People are free to praise and worship because their enthusiasm has no effect on the actual distribution of power.

The promise of technological frontiers becomes an illusion, and we become trapped ever deeper in material vanity in the name of escape. However, the constant tendency towards the emotional and mystical reveals the severe limits of the purely material world. Humanity cannot be created out of a yearning for the transcendent.

The real danger is that new tools will be used to build more efficient tyranny, potentially mistaking the best artificial intelligence for God.

Humanity’s origins were never merely material, and its destination could never be constructed by machines.

The problem is not the emptiness of human ambition, but the depth of human desire. Humanity does not simply aim for infinity. It is created to participate in it, as a mixture of dust and God.

notes and reading

• Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Was Born—Ferris Jable (2024). This is an excellent book that provides a journalistic overview of the idea that the Earth is not simply an inanimate planet on which life has evolved, but a living system that is continuously formed by the organisms that inhabit it. Microorganisms, plants, and animals do more than simply adapt to their environments. they change it. (Making rather than creating; leaving broader questions about consciousness unresolved.)

• Transmission and evolution of culture—Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman (1981). A fundamental work on gene culture theory by Cavalli-Sforza, the founder of modern human population genetics, and Feldman, the main theorist of gene culture coevolution.

• “Can progressives be convinced that genetics matter?”―About behavioral geneticist Kathryn Page Harden, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, new yorker (September 6, 2021).

• art and literature. Philip Leaf foresaw how modern times would exchange salvation for cure and remains “the pre-eminent prophet of our psychological age.” look The victory of therapy (1966) and earlier modern classics. dialectic of enlightenment (1944) by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

• Friedrich Nietzschee—For “Overman” (Übermensch) and “Last Man”, see the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Silicon Valley’s transhumanist projects seek to escape biological limitations through technology, but they risk engineering a Nietzschean nightmare of “the last man,” a herd-like creature with safety, predictability, and optimized comfort.

• Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Future of Humanity—John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (2016), Part I/2. Milbank and Pabst argue for a postliberal alternative that combines economic egalitarianism with a new social conservatism while rejecting prejudice against women, minorities, and the complexities of real human life. See this discussion for how this upends the modern left-right divide and market logic. Christian social vision At 53:00. You don’t have to accept the entire argument to realize how well it is done.

• Eastern Orthodoxy-Many converts are drawn to the depth of Eastern Orthodox liturgy and the lifelong mystical process of participating in the nature of God, as opposed to the more streamlined Western approach to faith. See “Eastern Orthodoxy Wins New Followers in America,” by Francis X. Rocca. wall street journal (May 17, 2023).

• Gender essentialism and orthodoxy: Beyond men and women―Bryce E. Rich (2023). Modern reactionary movements utilize Eastern Orthodox theology to construct idealized, highly gendered fortresses against Western modernity. It’s my first time doing this job. Critics may argue that Rich is too bound to contemporary academic terminology, including queer theory. He received his doctorate in theology from the University of Chicago and has participated in international conferences on Orthodoxy and sexuality. reference. George Demacopoulos, “The Story of Orthodoxy as Masculinity,” Public Orthodoxy, November 22, 2025.

Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin—Michael Millerman (2022). Demonizing Putin makes him more likely to be hated and harder to understand. The East is on the rise, the West is in decline, and Putin’s obvious weaknesses, such as the tensions of the war economy and weak domestic control, do not make him any less dangerous.

Western elites have long treated Alexander Dugin’s Eurasian civilization project as marginal. Ukrainian security services determined otherwise. In August 2022, a car bomb on the outskirts of Moscow destroyed Dugin’s car and killed his daughter Darya. This was a cruel sign that his ideas were not merely academic. Millerman provides the definitive treatment of Dugin’s philosophy in English. This project provoked an organized backlash during his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, and helped to exclude Dugin from traditional academic circles for attempting to treat Dugin’s Heideggerian framework seriously and fairly.

Just beauty

barcelona babel

Approximately 2+2=5