Transhumanism vs. reality: The metaphysical war conservatives must face

It might seem odd to bring up transhumanism at a national conservatism conference. What does a fringe group of scientists trying to “become gods” have to do with national security, fiscal sanity, or securing our borders?

But as leading conservative policy activist Rachel Bovard argued at NatCon 5, the greatest threat to the movement may not be unhinged debt, unchecked immigration, or even foreign enemies. These threats are real — but they’re symptoms of something deeper. The more dangerous threat is philosophical. It’s metaphysical. And it’s already being engineered.

Transhumanism will seduce the libertarian wing of the right with the promise of individual freedom, productivity, and human enhancement. But make no mistake: Transhumanism is not liberation. It’s the edge of a metaphysical cliff.

Transhumanism, broadly defined, seeks to use technology to overcome the limits of the human species. More specifically, it’s a global movement of scientists, technologists, and philosophers committed to accelerating humanity’s “evolution” into a post-human future — one free of weakness, ignorance, suffering, and, most ambitiously, death. Through artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, gene editing, and artificial wombs, transhumanists want to break the boundaries of biology itself.

Bovard is right to identify transhumanism as a direct assault on conservative metaphysics. Conservatives are metaphysical realists. We believe truth, goodness, and beauty exist independently of us. We believe human nature is not a construct but a reality — immutable, knowable, and worthy of reverence. The body is not an accident. It is a gift.

Transhumanism, in contrast, is anti-realist — and practically Marxist. Things like truth, goodness, beauty, and human nature are mere constructs. “In a world unmoored from truth,” Bovard warned, “everything can be rewritten. And the people with the most power can do the most rewriting.”

At its core, transhumanism isn’t a harmless theory tossed around on university campuses and tech conferences. It’s the will to power masquerading as liberation.

From transgenderism to transhumanism

The transgender ideology is the beachhead for this deeper revolution. If our culture can be convinced that male and female — the most basic, biological categories — are malleable, no metaphysical limit is left to defend. As Bovard put it, “If they can do that, they can do anything.”

Transgenderism prepares the way for transhumanism — both ideologies reject the body as given and instead treat it as material to be manipulated, dissolved, or remade. Both claim to be about “liberation,” but what they really offer is alienation from the real.

The ultimate goal, Bovard explains, is “to liberate people from reality” itself.

Transhumanism, however, goes beyond transgenderism’s attack on gender into reality itself. The human body is editable, the human mind programmable, death overcomable, and metaphysical guardrails deplorable.

This dystopic “liberation” entails children gestated in pods, designer embryos edited for optimal traits, death turned into a programming glitch, and the human mind as a blank canvas for artificial intelligence.

As the father of transhumanism, Oxford professor Max Moore said bluntly, “The body is not sacred.” If it’s just a “random accident,” the human being, then — and the world we live in — become raw material for the powerful to re-engineer.

Reclaiming reality

Bovard reminds us that conservatives cannot limit ourselves to fiscal or foreign policy debates. These are important, but they are downstream from the real crisis: the loss of reality itself:

The task ahead of us is not to come up with better “make-believe.” It’s to get back to reality. To return to the “real” — in our metaphysics, in our culture, in our politics.

Reclaiming reality means returning to the source that gives reality any meaning at all: God.

“Without God,” Bovard continued, “there is no truth. There is no beauty. There is no good. There is no ‘is.’ There is only ‘might.’ There is only power.”

This is why appeals to “Judeo-Christian values” — while noble — are no longer enough. If we treat values merely as political instruments, we hollow out the very God who gives those values meaning. The task is not to instrumentalize God for the sake of the culture. It is to submit our culture — and ourselves — to God.

Generic appeals to “Judeo-Christian values” simply won’t weather the storm.

Embodying a different image

Bovard rightly sees our “culture wars” as a metaphysical war and the political war as a spiritual one. “You can’t fight a spiritual battle with a tax plan,” she continues, “or a transhumanist future with GDP growth alone.” We must clearly and boldly articulate conservatism’s core beliefs of reality — and then embody them.

Rene Girard taught that humans are mimetic creatures — we desire what is mirrored to us by people, images, and narratives. For too long, the same Marxist, anti-realist paradigm has dominated the Leitkultur, our public images, and our leading institutions. They have tantalized the most vulnerable and left them broken, mutilated, and disembodied from reality.

We must embody a counter image. If we want the next generation to desire virtue, we must be people of virtue. If we want people to cherish human nature, we must fall in love with being human. And if we want to affirm reality, we must cherish it and the God who made it.

This means embodying truth, goodness, and beauty in our lives. It means affirming reality not just with arguments but with reverence. And it means recovering a politics that begins in metaphysics, not just in messaging.

RELATED: Transhumanists: The scientists who want to become gods

Photo by Andry Djumantara via Getty Images

Transhumanism will continue to grow in prominence. It will seduce the libertarian wing of the right with the promise of individual freedom, productivity, and human enhancement. But make no mistake: Transhumanism is not liberation. It’s the edge of a metaphysical cliff. And if we aren’t clear about what we’re for — not just what we’re against — we will find ourselves with strange and dangerous bedfellows.

Conservatism cannot simply be a social club for fiscal hawks and free speech warriors. It must be a positive commitment to the real: to human nature, to moral order, and to the God who authored them both.