The equally strange and brilliant man, Arthur C Clarke, wrote a gripping science fiction story in 1953 titled Childhood’s End. I do like science fiction, with CS Lewis’s space trilogy being my absolute favorite. If you like Arthurian mythopoetic sci-fi fantasy, chasing metaphysical and theological truth, you will love Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1942), and That Hideous Strength (1945). Clarke is just as imaginative, just as gripping a story teller, and just as drawn to the metaphysical dimension as was Lewis, but there the similarities end.
Clarke was a moving target as regards his first-order beliefs, but in 1953 he sported a spicey combination of scientific atheism, Westernized Buddhism, and extra-terrestrial romance. He was not then a physicalist, which is to say that ‘the physical’ was mystical and pantheistic to Clarke. He was fully up-to-date with post-Einsteinian physics and drawn to Niels Bohr’s Eastern metaphysics. Old fashioned spiritualism (“paranormal phenomena”) with what was then a non-standard sexuality certainly played into his conception of the psychic and libidinal ecosystem of human experience. Clarke was by no means strange among his peers as occult experimentation and sexual liberalism were all the rage in elite post-Christian scientific circles in the early twentieth century.
Childhood’s End is well worth reading, so my apologies for giving you a very simplified two paragraph plot overview below. I must also caution you that I read this book 45 years ago at high school, and whilst it made a lasting impression on me, it is possible that my memory is not exactly spot on regarding all details.
One day, with no warning, enormous spaceships arrive and settle down above all the major cities of the world. The extra-terrestrial civilization is obviously far in scientific advance of us, and after we unsuccessfully try and nuke them, a benign but firmly paternal hand is extended by the visitors, with consummate skill, over human affairs. The result of this interstellar visitation is that war, poverty and disease are all largely eradicated. But the new comers do not reveal themselves directly to humanity. After world peace is firmly in place it seems like there was only ever one spaceship after all, and this is the one settled over the United Nations building in Manhattan. One of the aliens has regular contact with the Director General of the United Nations, but why they have come, and what their intentions are remain unknown through most of the story. We don’t even find out what they look like until right at the end of Clarke’s narrative. The conversations between the DG of the UN and the Alien are urbane, and they reveal that the Alien is graced with a profound perception of and compassion for the human condition. We discover that they have been watching (and recording) us for thousands of years, and their archives solve all historical riddles, which leads to the universal collapse of religion. Their relationship to us is something like how a good kindergarten teacher understands and loves 4-year-olds. And indeed, it turns out that the Aliens are midwives. But their appearance… they look like textbook medieval devils. Horns, bat wings, red scaley skin, arrowhead-tipped tails.
After their arrival and enlightened reforms, things bubble along in a state of utopian paradise for some generations, and then something happens; and this something is what that Aliens knew would happen, and why they have come. It’s the children. A few at a time, at first, simply stop participating in normal human life. (Sound familiar?… “childhood’s end” has, to me, become the most eerie turn of phrase as regards the iPhone generation). Eventually they all stop eating, all stop talking, and link up in a collective trance, and start using their hitherto undreamed-of psychic powers. They make rivers run up stream and tear apart the physical structure of the planet and solar system, as they start to flex their young evolving super-physical collective powers. All adults just die off. But the children are evolving and are about to leave space-time physicality as we know it and join the super-physical and pantheistic cosmic One. The devil midwives – as scientifically advanced and brilliant as they are – are at the end of their evolutionary line and cannot join the One, so they are midwives watching the process, trying to learn from it. They are the doomed scientists of their own pending extinction, not due to attack or disaster, but simply due to a matter bound obsolescence.
Significantly, in this book Clarke is prophesying posthumanism of decisively more far-reaching dimensions than our contemporary small-minded ‘upload your consciousness to the cloud’ romantics. Yuval Harari is but splashing in shallow posthuman puddles. Clarke is launching out into the posthuman ocean.
If you want to be profoundly imaginatively and metaphysically stretched, do read Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I am now going to riff off the meta-themes of Clarke’s book, but I will contrast a Lewis-inflected reading of our post-human trends with a Clarke-inflected reading. Let us explore the end of childhood, devils, posthumanism, and the ancient hubristic desire to engineer our own theosis (become divine).
The attraction of platforming ourselves into the immortal domain of the divine has been with us since time out of mind. The biblical narrative of the hybridizing of fallen angels and mortals in the time of Noah, and the human divinizing push into the heavens via the great ziggurat of Babylon (the Tower of Babel) point to a perennial human fascination with graduating out of the limitations of mortal and animal life. The “taking of Heaven by force” with our own technologies of knowledge and power is a very old aspiration. The pyramids of Egypt, the sacrificial ziggurats of the Aztecs, the cannibalism and human sacrificial temples of the Polynesians… a fascination with ‘higher powers’ and ‘spiritual technologies’ of human metamorphic evolution into the divine sphere has never not been part of the human story. This sort of enterprise is by no means a type of endeavor that only super computers and AI have at last made possible. All that is happening today is that contemporary technology is the latest set of tools that some are now seeking to apply to an archaic self-divinizing and immortalizing aspiration. If you read Lewis’ That Hideous Strength the ‘National Institute for Creative Experimentation’ (N.I.C.E.) is his sci-fi imagined application of very modern, scientific, and notionally atheist tools to the age-old spiritual hubris and cosmic rebellion to which we are all so easily drawn. (Incidentally, it gave me quite a shiver to discover that the The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, branding itself under the acronym NICE, now actually exists in the UK.)
So let us play Devil’s Advocate for a bit. If we want to evolve past the natural limitations of human animality, then we need to destroy, shall we say, ‘organic’ childhood. How does one achieve the end of childhood? The on-line socialization and reflexive conditioning of children by the iPhone, algorithms, and AI chatbots is a merry and substantial step forward in post-human infant formation, but that process starts at a far more fundamental level.
The post-human aspiration is achieved firstly by destroying the animal realities of reproductive human sexuality as situated within the relational realities of familial love. For it is these bio-socio-cultural realities that define our natural humanity more than anything else. So – to evolve beyond the natural limits defined by biological necessity – we need to uncouple sex from both reproduction and the biological family. This aim was advanced in significant ways by the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 70s. We then need to make ‘sexuality’ about individual hedonic gratification, performative identity, free consent, and (conflicting with liberal consent) power – nothing else. This was strongly promoted in the 1990s, thanks to queer activist ‘theorists’ like (the then posthumous) Foucault, and Butler. Being reproductive mothers and fathers must be entirely optional (and frankly sub-optimal) to sexual behavior. This became a broadly assumed cultural truism, as backed by a thick flotilla of women’s and gay’s rights legislative reforms, in the neoliberal era spanning the 1980s to the 2010s. So by now, whilst state funded child-care may not perhaps be mandatory, it must certainly be available to any mother so that she is not bound by brute biology and instinct to care for and raise her own children. This is progress ensuring that woman can achieve liberal sexual equality with men. Women must be equally able to dissociate sexual activity from the responsibilities, mundane cares, costly chores, and life-long commitments of parenthood, as men. Thus also abortion must be readily available, for any reason, at any time during pregnancy, as a matter of equality (in parental irresponsibility) between sexually active men and women. Of course, normalizing non-reproductive sexual activity – contraceptive enabled recreational promiscuity, homosexuality, queer sexuality, pornography, and ‘safe’ prostitution – is also important. There can be no privilege, no ‘norm’ given to sacred heterosexual familial bonds. Thus “sex” (now essentially a non-reproductive and individually located self-actualization right) and “gender-identity” (whatever that is) can be released from reproduction, from the family, removed from the church, and can be made ‘spiritual’. For ‘spiritual’ sexuality and gender-identity are not about biological reproductive reality at all, and are not tied in any way to mortality. For birth and death are naturally integral.
Biologically, we have sex because we are going to die. To put this in biblical language, we are from and return to the dust, and we do not have life in us as such: life passes through us, and on to our children. Life belongs to God, it is not something us mortals can command, but we coax and nurture it as best as we can whilst it is within us. To revert to more biological language, because we are mortal the human species itself will die if we do not reproduce. Nature (the insult and affront of it) irrationally impels us to mate and raise our offspring. To revert to neoclassical economic language, having children violates the rational self-interest of the functionally materialist homo economicus who has no regard for anything else but quantified and hedonically maximized consumer satiation, for the term of one’s natural (or perhaps posthuman and indefinitely extended) life.
So our ego-centric ‘rational’ pleasure and interest maximizing consumer culture hates sexual reproduction. We resent nature, we despise mothers, we abhor the authority of fathers, we make sexual meaning all about self-love, we kill the unborn, we erode the family, and we do everything we can to make the raising of children something that professionals and the state increasingly does, and increasingly takes full responsibility for. (Parents who do not “gender affirm” their confused children will be firmly overridden, where necessary.) And – consonant with the individualist consumer spirit of our times – these are the explicit aims of queer activism: the destruction of heteronormativity, and the rejection of any relationship between biological reproductive reality and the strange new spiritual notions of both (as Judith Butler puts it) “sex” and “gender”. All this has a ‘spiritual’ (well gnostic) body-hating objective which defies our human animality, our natural sexual instincts, our biologically bonded relationships, and our mortality. We are creating the New Human: the Post-Human. Natural reproductive animality and the reproductive family stand in the way, and must be crushed. Children must not be born into families that are defined and upheld by strong and durable heterosexually bonded marriages. We are achieving childhood’s end. We are unmaking natural and animal humanity. We are evolving into post-human, yea post-sexual ‘spiritual’ beings.
In all this perhaps Clarke was strangely right: it seems we are being guided by demonic midwives in the intentional killing of our natural, our mortal, our animal humanity, and we are evolving into… something supernatural?
Clarke’s aliens were strangely similar to classical daemons, immortal super-intelligent beings of super-human powers who were neither good nor evil. They were just ‘there’ and were only interested in us for their own reasons, and were entirely indifferent to our natural and mortal concerns (which they usually found quite amusing). But of course, the pagan gods were pretty human as well. They lusted, they stole, they fought, they held grudges, they exacted revenge and so on. But we are a bit like the pagan theologians too. Butler takes the good with the bad, the dark with the light, for power and violence is just as much a feminine trait as it is a masculine trait (not that masculine and feminine have any essential meaning to Butler). So what sort of ‘spiritual’ utopia is this post-human, post-reproductive, post-natural “Queer Planet” actually bring into being?
Lewis has a different theological view to Clarke and Butler. In That Hideous Strength the ‘macrobes’ (non-physical intellective entities seeking to gain traction on our spatiotemporal world) have an “ethic” and “spirituality” of pure power: power for power’s sake. And those drawn by the lust for dominance – be that achieved through knowledge, or status, or the sheer thrill of violent and destructive Will, or the surrender to unbridled ego-centric narcissism – make a pact for their souls with these macrobes and become integral with their mission of total hatred towards biological humanity. There is an evil spiritual plot afoot to eradicate the natural human animal, and to destroy nature itself.
Looking at our present “progress” in the ending of childhood, you can have two sorts of views. The Clarkesque view sees a spiritual process going on that will transcend and yes destroy humanity, but there is some higher super-physical point to it all, beyond the capacity of our tiny minds to grasp. This is a bleakly determinist and inexorable stance that has no regard for whether natural humans might like their extinction, or forced spiritual evolution, or not. Progress is inexorable. Or you can view this in a Lewisesque manner, as symptomatic of War in Heaven in which humanity is in some sense unwittingly caught up in. There is a revolt against Heaven going on, which entails a revolt against creation (Earth) and the intentional defacement and destruction of the divine image as expressed in the beautiful but oh so frail and friable medium of oh so animal and mortal human flesh. Reproductive sex, children, stable familial love, and the natural goodness of the male and female sexed bodies is profoundly detested by our spiritual adversaries, for these entirely natural realities are even so carriers of divine meanings that our non-human adversaries oppose with a total hatred.
Which ever way you look at it, I think theological categories show up the core drivers of the present War Against Nature – both against the natural integrity of the world, and against the natural integrity of our humanity. For we are caught up in frightening and spiritually malicious assaults on the very viability of childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, the naturally sexed human body, and the reproductive family. Yet, take courage, brave hearts! For if Lewis is right (and I believe he is) then there are two sides in this war.
The manner in which – as Arthur Miller powerfully put it – “Heaven and Hell do wrestle on our backs” is a struggle that does not have any reductively adequate “naturalistic” explanation. But then, the natural never is simply reductively naturalistic, it is always a carrier of transcendently glorious and terrifyingly diabolical meanings. Shopping is not the meaning of life. There actually is Good and Evil. There actually is Darkness and Light. There is a War in Heaven fought on Earth that is of cosmic significance to each one of us. Thus there has always been a moral and spiritual battle that rages around the oh so human and oh so natural realities of our sexed animal bodies. And this is why sacred natality – the birth of the Christ-child, and hallowing of the holy family of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus – have such a crucial role in defining the central meaning of humanity within what used to be Western Christendom. Christmas is still a point of cultural resonance with that long sacred yet natural humanism of the glory and wonder of family life. For in the formerly Christian West, the fulness of the most concretely natural, animal, and mortal meaning of our humanity – the committed loving sexual union of a man and a woman, in covenant, for life – is a divine sacrament. This is why the Devil so hates nature, and so hates reproductive sex, and so hates and attacks functional loving families. And this is why we need more that human power to fight in this war.
Working as a scholar of philosophy and theology, I have had many a fine dialogue with noble atheists over the years. Many such people - in my estimation - are far too theologically sensitive to stomach most of what now goes on in your average church on a Sunday. For even though you will find beautiful Christians at almost any church, all ‘culturally appropriate ministries’ in our ego-centric consumer times operate at a very low spiritual ebb at present in the West. The pathologies of therapeutic individualism, ego-centric wish-fulfilment thinking, and slickly marketed and entertainment crafted consumer ‘spiritualities’ of an anserine infatuated posturing are routinely passed off as the worship of God on Sunday mornings in Australia. You can avoid this if you go to a Latin Mass Catholic church, or to the Orthodox (though language can be an accessibility problem). Yet, talking with atheists, it has always struck me that the Problem of Good is just as intractable a problem for unbelief as is the Problem of Evil is to belief. Equally, it has always seemed interesting to me that evidence for the reality of the Devil is just as easy to find as evidence for the reality of God if one is prepared to sensible about what evidence actually entails. You just have to work in any large institution to realize that the demonic is structurally integral with how stratified human power typically works. You just have make any genuine contact with love, and the callous indifference of an absurd cosmos can only be believed in by the most willful determination to embrace absurdity. But we have now lost all theological intelligence in our culture of public knowledge. Thus, basic human realities that were obvious to your average Westerner even just sixty years ago now have no words of public commonsense that can describe what we actually know.
To conclude.
We are witnessing a most frightening childhood’s end with the making of even the most basic realities of natural sexual reproduction seem offensive and repulsive to a generation of young people. But – I put it to you – this is a demonic plot against humanity itself. But if it is a demonic plot, then we will need divine aid in order to overcome it. So – my dear agonistic and atheist friends – when all else fails (and science, reason, debate, respectable authorities, the law, commonsense facts, and human decency now routinely do fail in this domain) consider prayer. Perhaps there really is War in Heaven, and perhaps it is being fought over the very animality, mortality, and divinely graced beauty of human reproductive sexual love. But whatever our adversary does to us, we must fight to the end to uphold childhood and the covenant reproductive family. We must do whatever we can to preserve the dignity and glory of the natural animal realities of the sacred human condition.
I share your view that a demonic plot is afoot. Absolutely. Nothing else can explain the depth and breadth of atrocities being committed by the medical field. "Transgenderism" is but one of their forays.
I read in Matthew B Crawford's work that the first hospitals were started by Christians. The other day I was prompted to wonder, is this why the devil has taken up residence in the medical field?
The following is a quote from Philip Rieff, The Crisis of the Officer Class, which I came across in Aaron Kheriaty's The New Abnormal - The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (epigraph to Chapter 3, p131):
"The nightmare of the brave new world need not fear old-fashioned torture and gas chambers. The universal totalitarian institution will be the hospital, and the universal uniform of the new elites will be the white physician-therapist coast. The brave new world will be...one vast hospital".