Miklos Lukacs de Pereny (Lima, 1975) is a Peruvian academic specialising in philosophy of technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Management and a Masters in Innovation Management from the University of Manchester in the UK, a Masters in International Development from the University of Wellington in New Zealand, and a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the Universidad Mayor de Chile. He is also a graduate of the Artificial Intelligence Programme at Oxford University.
He is currently senior professor of science and technology at the University of San Martin de Porres in Peru and visiting professor of ethics and technology at the Panamerican Business School in Guatemala. He has been a lecturer at the Universities of Essex and Manchester in England and ESAN in Peru, a senior research fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary, and visiting research fellow at the Paris Institute of Technology. He has presented his research work at academic and public conferences in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Ecuador, England, France, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Romania, Scotland, Scotland, and Sweden. He is currently based in England.
Lukacs has just published his first book, Neo entes: Tecnología y cambio antropológico en el siglo XXI (“Neo entities: Technology and anthropological change in the 21st century”), in which he warns of the dangers of transhumanism.
In your book you talk about progressivism as a religion. How does this religion sell transhumanism?
It is sold as a material improvement, as an idea of progress in which the human being is improved, replaces God, and becomes God thanks to technology. The problem with this approach is that it is a false and empty promise. The sine qua non condition of this process is that the human being ceases to be human. You will progress, but the cost of that progress is that you cease to be what you are. So, homo sapiens can transition into a homo deus or any kind of form, what I call a neo-entity. Basically, technology is going to allow you to be whatever you want to be and that is one of the promises of progress.
This technological progress is accompanied by a postmodern moral progress, in which all the value categories that Judeo-Christianity established in the previous 2000 years become irrelevant. This progressive morality is completely anti-Christian. We are going to be better intellectually, cognitively, physically, and morally, but this morality is an amorality because it has no landmarks and no flag. It is a relativistic morality.
The idea of homo deus reminds me of the Soviet ‘new man’ and other similar experiments, detaching man from his roots and moulding him as if he were clay.
Indeed, this idea of the new man is not new, it goes back a long way. For example, I cite the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, especially the Marquis de Condorcet and Denis Diderot, who were already playing with this idea of the perpetual perfectibility of the human being. Diderot was already predicting the rise of the ‘superman’ by way of the reconfiguration and redefinition of the human being. This was not possible in the 18th century, but it is possible today. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, or robotics have the proven potential to reconfigure the human being as a species.
Going back to the past, Darwinism, with its idea of the common ancestor, is a torpedo to the waterline of Christianity that placed human beings in a special category, as God’s favourite creature. Then came Herbert Spencer with social Darwinism and ‘survival of the fittest,’ from which came scientific racism and eugenics. This whole process breaks the Christian belief that we are all equal, that we are all children of God, and in the 20th century we see the consequences. These consequences are well illustrated by communism and the aspiration of homo sovieticus, an invincible man, though not in the individual aspect, but in the collective aspect, as part of the Soviet Union.
But this whole idea of technological progress as the guarantor of a better world has already proved false. At the beginning of the 20th century there was talk of the end of war because of the advances of progress, the result of which was the First and Second World Wars.
Yes, so this idea of progress posits that human beings are imperfect, inferior, and undesirable, and that they need to be improved. It is a profoundly anti-humanist and anti-Christian idea of progress. It is an anti-human idea. The main critic of this idea of progress is John Gray, especially in his work Straw Dogs, where he states that it is absurd to think that technological progress entails moral progress. Gray correctly argues that human beings have not changed, we are essentially the same as we were 2000 years ago.
However, this idea cuts across all postmodern progressive movements: technology is the engine of change. Therefore, regardless of political or economic debates, current processes cannot be understood without incorporating the scientific and technological variable. If we omit them, we will be constructing a contemporary political dynamic that is not accurate. For example, what generated the first industrial revolution was a technology, the steam engine. Thirty years later, textile industries appeared, i.e. technology generated a new economic process: modern capitalism. The new technologies are orders of magnitude superior to the steam engine, because they not only have the potential to modify the human environment, but to reconfigure the human being itself. These technologies are giving rise to a new economic model, which is the shift from physical to digital economies. This new model will establish new economic power relations and new forms of political dynamics. Therefore, reading today’s politics through the lens of the past, as a dispute between Left and Right factions born in the 18th century, is anachronistic. The war of the 21st century is not just a political, economic, cultural, or social war. The great war of the 21st century is the anthropological war between progressive visions who conceive of the human being as improvable and those who believe that the human being must maintain his dignity and integrity. Human beings at the service of technology versus technology at the service of human beings.
We are seeing trans laws starting to be implemented in different countries. If we accept that a person can define their sex at will, don’t we open the door to other phenomena such as trans-age or trans-species?
That is precisely what it is. These variations from human or other species are what I call neo-entities, although my definition is not limited to the physical world and includes digital creations as well. We are already seeing this reconfiguration of the human being, because it is increasingly impossible even to distinguish man from woman. In the name of this technological progress, all categories of human being are emptied of their ontological content. This means that there is not one sexual category, but hundreds of genders, or that there is no difference between adults and children, not only ontologically but also morally with regard to the decisions they can make, and all are included in the term ‘persons.’ Thus, we hear progressive politicians say that sexual diversity is enjoyed by ‘persons’ as long as there is consent.
The prefix ‘trans-’ is not random. Transhumanism, i.e., the transition of the human, derives from pre-transhumanist categories: transsexual or transgender, transracial, trans-race, trans-age, trans-species, trans-capable, etc. You can put anything into the trans category and thus the ontological content of the human being is emptied. You can be anything, this is the redefinition, and you can use technology for change, for reconfiguration. We see it with the presence of trans women in beauty competitions or in women’s sports. It is the redefining and reconfiguring of the human being.
Aren’t you afraid of being accused of conspiracy theorising?
No, I don’t mind. The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ here stems from people’s ignorance of recent scientific and technological developments, such as, for example, that male and female gametes, i.e., sperm and eggs, can be obtained from stem cells. This was achieved in 2014 and published in the journal Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. This allowed the Weizmann Institute in Israel last year to create artificial mouse embryos from these gametes. Technically, sperm could be obtained from a woman’s stem cells, thus removing the man from the reproductive process. And this is where the new masculinities, heteropatriarchy, and all these brutal attacks on masculinity come in.
And what would be the purpose, the ultimate goal, of this whole reconfiguration process?
All of this has an end that leads to the main agenda that regulates all these interventions, which is the environmental agenda. This is the mother agenda of progressivism because it is the basis on which the human being is blamed for the environmental crisis. Human beings, with the terrible tool of capitalism, are to blame for climate change and represent an existential risk. It is the “human plague” coined by David Attenborough in 2013, which capitalism uses to destroy Mother Earth and is therefore a threat to the existence of our species. This existential risk demands measures that are morally justifiable to save the planet. This is where population control and all agendas come in: abortion, LGBT ideology, sex education, radical feminism, and trans ideology. ‘Diversity,’ in which children and adolescents are indoctrinated, promotes non-heterosexual sexual relations that do not lead to procreation and seek, at bottom, population reduction.
Then there is feminism, which is not the empowerment of women, but seeks to criminalise the natural sexual behaviour of men. Then comes speciesism and animalism, which seek to increase the morality of the animal and decrease the moral quality of the human being. You humanise the animal and dehumanise the human. And finally euthanasia, which, like abortion, objectifies and instrumentalises the human being, who becomes a dispensable item. It is no longer a question of helping that person to get by, but rather that in the cost-benefit ratio it is cheaper to kill him or her.
The real danger of all this anthropological warfare is that in the end, under Malthusian and post-Darwinian criteria, all means to reduce the plague are justified. It is an openly eugenic project, and we know how all these eugenic projects end up in history. The greatest risk is that all human reproduction will be put in the hands of technology, and that would be the end of the human being. It would be the creation of homo deus, but not of the whole population but of the minority that controls, markets, manufactures, regulates, and supervises these technologies. We already have genetic pre-implantation and in vitro fertilisation techniques; the UK’s three-parent law already exists; the University of Eindhoven is working on the creation of artificial human wombs; and there are even postpartum artificial intelligence nannies to control the development of babies without human presence. This is not science fiction, it is reality.
Is there resistance to this transhumanist agenda?
Yes, there is very strong resistance. The problem is that most people sense that this is wrong and repudiate trans, LGBT, or feminist agendas, but they don’t know exactly what these agendas are about. And then there is a lack of political initiative because the populations have been tamed under a technique of exhaustion and demoralisation: COVID, economic and energy crisis, and so on. The problem is that if people do not react in time we will very soon be faced with a very well established system of coercion through technological control—[a social credit system] like the one that already exists in China.
