Tower of Babel

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

The story of the Tower of Babel should be understood as a story about the foolishness of attempting to achieve metaphysical elevation by physical means. 

Transhumanism is another Tower of Babel. Technology cannot grant transcendence.

Becoming superhuman, becoming shaman, demands an arduous demolition of the ego and its fixations. To become spirit, the prospective shaman must first experience death. Only then can he visit the heavens and the underworld. Cyborgs cannot do this.

If there ever was an alternative to modernity,

it could only have been a return to what preceded it. 

Instead, the postmodern attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment was formulated as a leap toward some vague transhumanism—which is really an attempt to reinvent religion as antireligion, alongside the attempt to reinvent art as antiart, the old impulse to worship the more-than-human turned into a desire to idolize the less-than-human.

From earliest times,

humans have sought to model themselves after animals. Something more than a totemic relationship was involved. Animal idolatry offered a means to honor what in the human is more than human. 

The freakishness of the modern world is the product of a humanistic depreciation of the animal, whose worship is replaced by worship of the machine. 

Unlike the animal, the machine is inhuman without being noble. Marinetti, hyperventilating about the beauty of the machine is obliged to theriomorphize his automobile into a centaur and later on a shark. But the machine is not animal. It does not have a  mind of its own. It is insensate to joy or pain. It runs when supplied with power but is otherwise lifeless. 

The worship of the machine is the worship of death. 

To become machine is to become an insentient tool. The fantasy that machines can achieve sentience is a fetishistic defense against encountering the alien deadness of the machine. We humanize machines in order not to notice that they are refractory in their total, implacable indifference to everything around them.

The machine is in fact the closest possible figuration of death. And its use inexorably deadens the user.

The cult of the animal was life affirming.

Humanism seduced man with his own image and made him a slave of his own clever inventions. Now he dreams of becoming transhuman so he can be even more closely mated with the machine, again with promise that this will give him powers he could not otherwise attain and perhaps even immortality. Too late he will discover that to become imperishable by becoming machine means he has merged with nonlife and already perished.