Tea at Trianon: Shakespeare vs. the Transhumanists

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 15, 2024

Shakespeare vs. the Transhumanists

From Andrew Klavan at The City Journal:

I find these days that even friends with no religion have begun to speak in religious terms. Recently, within a single week, I heard the word “demonic” used five times, four times by people who don’t believe in demons. Stranger still, and not long after, I found myself in two separate conversations in which the sort of men who would never speculate upon the coming of the “end of days” began, with some embarrassment, to do exactly that.

The subject, in each case, was transhumanism: transgenderism, artificial intelligence, artificial wombs, the melding of man and medication, man and machine. There was a sense that we were arriving at a moment of choosing—choosing, each of us, whether we would continue to be what we were originally made, male and female, mortal, fallible, passionate, irrational, seemingly random in our individual qualities and yet recognizable, even if only in metaphor, as the image of God. Or would we, through medication, surgery, implants, and the like, become whatever it is we would: happier presumably, smarter in some sense, maybe even eternal in some sense, free in form, no mere image of God, but electric gods ourselves?

Believers and unbelievers both, we wondered in these conversations, sometimes ironically (or maybe irony was simply a form of mental self-defense): Was it possible that this choice we were approaching, between a human or a cyborg future, was the final sorting of sheep and goat, sinner and saint, saved and damned, that the Bible foretold? (Read more.)