I recently attended a seminar on AI in which the speaker presented a recent exchange with ChatGPT, ending in the chatbot giving a very convincing imitation of a human compliment. “That should feel weird,” the speaker told the audience, and judging by the largely over-30 crowd, he made his point. During the Q&A session, I stepped up to the mic and pointed out a critical, generational point: “None of what you described seems weird at all.”
I was born in 2001, the last generation to be older than YouTube. Compared to currently rising and future generations, that’s like having seen a living dinosaur. Yet I feel perfectly at home in the online world of 2025. I watch the absolute overflow of “how Christians should think about AI” pieces and consistently see authors churning out explanations based on assumed premises of unfamiliarity, foreign tools, and navigating a world that fundamentally wasn’t made for the people reading. That’s not my world. The internet and its denizens are familiar ones—which is why I think it’s likely going to be Generation Z and its descendants who move the needle the most on tech innovation and cultural engagement in the online space.
But it’s easy, amid all that familiarity, to forget that the debates of our electron-centric world are largely reflections of broader philosophical struggles. The arguments we’re having over AI’s alignment with humanity, the way gender ideology proliferates online, and/or the effects of social media on real-life community don’t exist in a vacuum. Those defending the bleeding edge of the pro-technology argument often reflect serious anthropological and ideological differences, not merely practical quibbles. And many of those ideological differences are driven by a worldview that sees our human nature not as an imago dei to be championed and valued but as an undesirable obstacle to be overcome or, in its most extreme iteration, discarded completely. This worldview is called transhumanism.
Be it the vampiric obsessions of online influencers like Bryan “Don’t Die” Johnson or the ramblings of radical gender ideologues like Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Long Chu, who believes puberty itself to be a disease, our culture is awash with figures attempting to hack humanity. Advocates of a free and virtuous society would benefit from a serious attempt to catalog the rise and (somewhat) triumph of transhumanism and not merely the damage that’s resulted.
Enter Grayson Quay’s The Transhumanist Temptation. Quay begins with a seemingly mundane but crucial insight: that critical prefix trans-. It’s easy to think, especially against the backdrop of the transgenderism debate (moving between genders), that transhumanism is a similar concept. But is it? We’re moving between humanity and … what exactly? Quay’s point: The trans of transhumanism means moving not between two things but beyond humanity itself, with the limits of ordinary mortality the very box from which we must escape. Those limits, in Quay’s words, maintain that “humans are a particular type of being for whom a particular type of flourishing is proper and that we ought to remain that type of being and pursue that type of flourishing, instead of attempting to become something else.” Disregarding such confines is transhumanism. In case you can’t tell, there’s a lot of explaining to do here—yet Quay manages to make his case in under 300 pages.
To Quay, technological questions, while not the entirety of the transhumanist debate, highlight the critical role that technology plays in creating power structures:
It may be that no one will force you to grow your baby in a pod or get augmented reality visual implants. But you won’t be the one controlling those technologies, either, and the ways in which they’re reshaping you and the people around you might not become obvious until it’s too late.
It’s a point that takes us back to that initial observation about being born a digital native: Has my generation been reshaped in ways that we can’t even fully understand, like slowly boiled frogs? There’s a solid case for saying so, which Quay addresses—we’re the first generation to have the privilege of killing ourselves over romantic relationships with chatbots, a fate no previous generation would have been able even to conceptualize. And while generational changes happen, well, every generation, the ones we’re being confronted with feel much different.
Let me give you an example. I was never tempted to ask a chatbot to summarize a difficult book before 2021, for largely the same reason no one in 1876 was particularly tempted to sneak a click on a PornHub page. You can’t crave the shortcut that doesn’t exist. But I won’t pretend like I don’t think about punting difficult paragraphs to ChatGPT now—and for my future kids, that temptation will be almost irresistible. But that’s the thing: It’s a temptation. It’s a tempting offer to affirm rather than reject something fundamentally wrong about who I am as a person, to say that the process of struggling with and understanding the difficult (and sometimes not-well-written) literature of our past is a shackle to broken as opposed to a workout to be powered through.
Virtually all transhumanist ideology represents different iterations of these fundamentally incorrect shortcuts. Appearance obsession, powered by everything from Ozempic to Snapchat filters, means that the struggle to accept one’s own traits and fix one’s own flaws is a struggle to be avoided as opposed to accepted. Abortion, eugenics, and the fundamentally anti-human narratives that accompany them mean that the question of what to do with anyone who’s less than perfect and convenient can be easily answered with a surgical procedure, as opposed to being grappled with by a society that recognizes the sanctity of life.
Quay offers countless other examples while also providing a refreshingly clear-eyed assessment of where the technological progress of our day is likely headed: forward, without stopping. You will “find yourself facing down what transhumanist author and biotech entrepreneur Gregory Stock calls ‘the invasion of the inhuman, the displacement of the born by the made, and the twilight of humanity.’” Moreover, “Transhumanism, [Stock] argues, is inevitable—you can be sad about it, but you can’t stop it.”
To be sure, Temptation has its overstated assertions, particularly as to the political applications made near its conclusion. In discussing political alternatives to classical liberalism (which, Quay asserts, was the political system that gave rise to transhumanism), he broaches the question of Catholic integralism as a governmental alternative. Says Quay: “The Church’s bioethical statements alone are enough to tempt even a non-Catholic anti-transhumanist to hand the Church the keys to government.” As a non-Catholic anti-transhumanist, let me just say: They are not.
Another overblown point of Quay’s analysis is his direct line between liberalism and the modern “antiracist” activist-scape. “Calls for decolonization, affirmative action, and antiracist discrimination to break these systems of privilege are best understood not as manifestations of illiberal collectivism but as collective struggles for individual liberation.” My only question is … why? Movements like DEI and “antiracism” aren’t exactly resounding examples of classical liberal values (freedom of speech, value-neutral public square, viewpoint diversity in higher education). The classical liberal/illiberal binary is real. Putting the Kendi/DiAngelo crowd on the same side of that binary as folks like Douglass Murray, Carl Trueman, and Niall Ferguson requires a lot better argument than what is on offer here.
Furthermore, a theme throughout Temptation is Quay’s skeptical approach to capitalism for its alleged role in fostering transhumanism. Again, I’m not convinced: “Systems that allow people to build things will sometimes result in people building bad things” is not a particularly compelling argument (if it can even be called that). It’s certainly not compelling when it comes from “sustainability” advocates complaining that fossil fuels exist. In Quay’s somewhat-defense, his critiques of capitalism largely take aim at the worship/overdependence on capital markets to answer moral questions. Yet, when your policy suggestions include things like tariffs and immigration restrictions, we need to have a conversation about how we got to the point where we’re asking state bureaucracies to answer moral questions in the first place.
Quay also talks at length about the growth of AI and the way many advocates of the technology see it as a tool to supplant, not supplement, human potential. Yet, as someone in the corporate-engagement space, I can say that some of the most moral, important, and necessary work being done in AI is being done by the private sector, particularly in the realm of combating human trafficking. The notion of “use the capital structure to defeat the capital structure” is one that moral, upright businesspeople work with every day to defeat the darkest realities of our modern world. And without the scalability and profit-making abilities that capital markets create, that wouldn’t be happening.
I’m trying to be as specific as possible in my criticisms because the book on the whole is fairly good. It’s a useful application of what other modern works, like Carl Trueman’s landmark The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, argue. And perhaps most importantly, Quay’s practical roadmap for what the individual can do to minimize the impact of transhumanism is realistic. From resisting the twin extremes of tech futurism and online LARP-ing racial essentialism to prioritizing faith and family, Quay recognizes and respects the power of the individual to refuse to submit to the collective lie of transhumanism. Getting rid of AI isn’t feasible—we’re past that. And none of us has the time for more pie-in-the-sky calls to “Just drink your tea and dream about a world where the left doesn’t control virtually all of society’s institutions.” No such indulgences in Temptation.
Some, particularly of a more fantastical temperament, might walk away from The Transhumanist Temptation disappointed at the practical section: “That’s it?” My response: Exactly what do you want people to aspire to? It’s far past time for us, as advocates of a free and virtuous society, to remember the power of ordinary people to resist becoming conduits for anti-human lies. Quay understands that the most effective thing we can do against an ideology that sees humanity as a disease involves—wait for it—humans being human. Shocking.
