Posthumanism

There is a war raging for your child’s mind. The battle is between those who are trying to preserve truth, humanity, and freedom and those who believe that humans are little more than parasites on the earth that must be managed by experts wielding swords of science and behavioral manipulation. Forget about fighting racist and divisive critical race theory! That threat has already been recognized and is in the process of being neutralized. The real danger to education is being kept hidden from prying parental eyes. It’s so outside of what most of us would consider reality that you may think I’m making it up, but I’m not.

I am talking about Posthumanism which, simply put, is the philosophy that we should stop thinking of the world from a human-first viewpoint and reframe our consciousness to consider animals, nature, and other non-humans, such as trans humans, to be equally important and interconnected. Posthumanism is not necessarily about technologically-modified transhumans, but they would be included on the platform of equal beings. Posthumanism is more concerned with removing man from his job of ruling and reigning over all other things. A related concept is the idea of agency, which states that all things, even inanimate objects, ““capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own”. The agenda of posthumanists is hidden like poison in policies carefully worded to hide or omit the inevitable outcome of equating non-humans with humans.

This posthumanist philosophy is working hard to find ways to quietly infiltrate the education system, and has already influenced many in the field of education. They seek to teach children that animals and nature and augmented humans are equal to humans. This movement is a natural result of the brainwashed climate movement blending with feminist, critical theory, degrowth, animal rights and New Age cultures. The endgame of all of these movements is the rejection of God as the ultimate power and creator of man and nature. They instead give that power to a universal force that supposedly contains all things including our minds and nature and even non-living things. Another word for this idea is pantheism, however some leave out the theism part. This would be more like naturalism which puts ‘nature’ at the center of the universe, which is the ultimate goal of posthumanism. No matter the details, there is no place in any of these theories for a God that is sovereign over man and nature. While it can be tempting to dismiss these dangers as academics, the threat is real. It is already being implemented by reorienting curriculum to a “nature as equal to or more important than humans” perspective.

You will not find this information on mainstream websites or in popular videos. It is discussed in academic circles and published in journals. I submit the following results of my research below.

First let us look at what the UN states on their public website. Then we will read between the lines in more indepth articles.

Achieving sustainable development requires a global change of mindsets, beliefs and behaviours, and education is vital to this task. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) offers a framework for transforming learning to reorientate the human relationship with the natural environment and prepare individuals to take informed decisions and make responsible choices for environmental integrity. It builds the skills and attitudes needed to question the way we think, the values we hold and the decisions we make in the context of sustainable development.

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/realizing-rights-child-through-environmental-education

In this bizarre and enlightening article, the authors lament that the curriculum of Lithuania is not sufficiently posthuman: “They are totally oriented toward humans and pupils, without a single word about nature and without acknowledging the multiple interrelations of human, nonhuman, and more than human beings. As if we are separated, and as if our survival does not depend on the survival of nonhumans and more than humans.” They go on to critique the curriculum and find multiple faults based on the complaint that animals and nature are not portrayed as human equals.

They criticize the current methods and goals of STEM education and bemoan that it is market-driven and too human-centered and doesn’t recognize the inter-connectedness of humans and non-humans. Do not make the mistake of thinking that there is nothing wrong with this improving the treatment of nature. That is not their goal. The goal is not to elevate nature, the goal is to LOWER humans to the status of animals and rocks. This is a post-Christian, evolutionary theory that rejects the idea that God created man in His image. These demonically controlled ‘angels of light’ are part of the Gaia religion, even if they don’t call it that. I doubt that most of them are even aware of how they are being used to prepare the world for this new religion of earth worship.

Although they claim to deplore the idea of ‘using’ animals, they are not afraid to use indigenous religion and culture to build a shaky foundation of why posthumanism should be embraced by all people. Pre-Christian religions believed that animals and nature had spirits and were connected to humans. While this romantic idea might sound nice, because we have already been brainwashed for years into this pagan idea, it is not a Biblical concept. However it is handy for posthumans to point to indigenous peoples during a time when people have heightened sensitivity to the oppressive treatment, and murder, of various groups in colonial times. Yet we must not be deceived by these attempts to draw us into paganism. They do not care about indigenous people or any people. Remember the goal is to reduce the status of humans, not raise the status of indigenous people. It is simply a means to an end for them.

This is how they describe themselves and their work to change education and culture: “Posthumanists broaden the Anthropocene discussion by enriching the climate change crisis debate with socio-economic and labour relations intertwined in it and by urging to abandon the ideologemes of capitalistic consumerist ideology: individualism, universalism, and self-determinism, which breed dogmatic tendencies of domination, exploitation, and the abuses of science and technology, grounded in rationality and the illusion of separateness (Braidotti, 2013).”

Their main goal is to use stealth education to attempt to convince the sane people of the world that humans are the same in status as non-humans, which includes nature itself, animals, and eventually, transhumans. You may recognize this attempt to make everything equal. It’s the same old story. And you probably won’t be surprised to find the concept of ‘sustainability’ in the arguments. Of course I am not saying that nature and animals have no value or that they should be abused or wasted. But God made man separate from the animals and gave him the job of stewarding the world, not vice versa or any other arrangement.

Frequently cited in the article is the philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Bradotti. Her latest book is called Posthuman Feminism and she describes how feminists must become posthumanists while continuing to fight for gender justice, but without the idea that humans are the superior race. You might think someone like her was a harmless academic, but then you see her ideas making it into teaching colleges.

In this article from UNESCO Canada, the author describes how she views the current educational system: “grounded in a patriarchal humanist worldview of the developed Western world and its
colonial outreaches”, “The humanist subject emerging from this worldview is a white, ablebodied, cisgendered, heterosexual male, which places all other humans in positions of inferiority, and
thereby justifies regimes of oppression (e.g., residential schools) that continue to plague our societies.

Via industrialization and globalization, this view has become dominant. It erases collective memories,
territorial and cultural identities, and relationships between places and people where traditional
knowledges encompass and form essential infrastructures and meanings in our lives”

And how posthumanist education can fix that. “Creating the new ideas that our world urgently needs requires new modes of teaching that disrupt old
ways of thinking and create new knowledges. This is what a posthumanist perspective can bring to our
education systems1
Posthumanism offers new ways of conceiving humans, including teachers and learners, as non
exceptional and entwined with other beings.” She says that first teachers have to change how they teach and stop seeing themselves as an “authoritative, detached, knowledgable other”.

The following is a quote from another UNESCO article. Donella Meadows who wrote Limits to Growth, the famous study that the Club of Rome’s climate disaster predictions are based, is mentioned in the article in regards to systems thinking. The need for a posthuman world, according to the article, is because we must make radical changes or the world will force us to.

Widespread pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss are undesirable consequences of global capitalism and industrialization. These crises arose from the belief that humans are both separate from and can control nature. Posthumanism is a new western philosophy that does not separate humans from the natural world. This is also consistent with evidence from the field of molecular biology, which recognizes that humans are an inseparable part of, and have co-evolved with, nature. This radical change in western worldview provides a foundation for thinking about how societies might change to meet current sustainability challenges. That is because worldviews often give rise to the laws and policies that govern the relationship between people and nature.

https://brocku.ca/unesco-chair/2022/08/22/transformation-to-a-posthuman-world-can-systems-thinking-support-transformative-change/

In this article from The IAFOR Journal of Education (2016) , the author spells out how and why to put posthuman theory into practice.

This paper explores how to practice posthumanism in everyday life. This idea has increasingly
come under scrutiny by posthumanist theorists, who are addressing fundamental ontological
and epistemological questions in regard to defining an essential ‘human,’ as well as the elastic
boundary work between the human and nonhuman subject. Posthumanism is essential for
considering today’s environmental problems and environmental science education. This paper
then has three goals: developing posthumanist ontology, exploring methodology, and
investigating whether environmental science education and practices can help students,
teachers, and community in learning, teaching, and practicing processes. I demonstrate the
complementary contributions from two Indigenous communities’ field studies that can be made
when a researcher moves beyond an exclusive focus on western interests and considers
participants as co-researchers. This paper concludes with a discussion of implications for this
field.

The first aspect is amplifying which means interconnectedness or fluidity in posthumanism
methodology (Whatmore, 2013a). Whatmore defines interconnectedness as different ways of
thinking, as all bodies (not only human bodies rather all kinds of bodies within earth), as a
whole body. According to her, our body is not only controlled by our cognition, but also our
cognition also can be controlled by our body. For example, if our finger touches anything, it
has effects on our entire body and/or our cognition. So the idea is that our finger has the ability
to control our cognition, instead of our brain having complete control of our body. New bodily
approaches need to evolve from amplifying in posthumanist methodology. Haraway (2004)
The IAFOR Journal of Education Volume 4 – Issue 1 – Spring 2016 56
also makes a similar point, that our knowledge interferes by a set of factors, and each setting
has relational influences on the others. Similar arguments are made by Indigenous scholars
Smith (2005) and Wilson (2013) that all action is relational. Such relational actions help us to
understand how we come to know, and how we can achieve our goals.
The second aspect is mapping into knowledge. Whatmore’s (2013a) mapping is the idea that
through training we can control our bodies and capacities to move in the world and to sense
the world and how other kinds influence us. Drawing from Latour (2004) and Haraway (2008)
Whatmore (2013a) explains that mapping into knowledge is an idea that we need to learn and
practice to understand these kinds of effects on us. Mapping into knowledge is the ability to
influence the way the world wants to speak to us.
The third aspect is redistributing expertise. According to Whatmore (2013a) our knowledge
needs to redistribute in collaborative ways, for example working with science and collaboration
between science and public policies by the source of knowledge that we want to build
ourselves. Redistributing expertise is a deconstruction of our material understanding of the
ways of understanding, the way in which we relate, and the ways in which we act with our
material world (Haraway, 2004).

In English, she is saying that we ‘posthumans’ can learn to control reality and also communicate with inanimate objects and that we must change science and public policy so that these ideas can be adapted. Posthumanism is a metaphysical theory. This leads us to Gaia.

Gaia Theory and Posthumanism

“The Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, posits that Earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single entity. This entity has closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. Introduced in the early 1970s, the idea was conceived by chemist and inventor James E. Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis. This new way of looking at global ecology and evolution differs from the classical picture of ecology as a biological response to a menu of physical conditions. The idea of co-evolution of biology and the physical environment where each influences the other was suggested as early as the mid-1700s, but never as strongly as Gaia, which claims the power of biology to control the nonliving environment. More recently, the terms Gaian science or Gaian theory have become more common than the original Gaia hypothesis because of modifications in response to criticisms and expansion of our scientific understanding.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080454054007357?via%3Dihub

I believe that Gaia theory is the foundation for posthumanism, even if not every proponent would agree. The central thesis of posthumanism is that man is simply one part of a total system, and definitely not the most important part. The earth and the world will continue to function just fine without humans, they say, and they welcome the demotion of humans. Man, especially males, must be knocked off his pedestal so that nature can have it’s day. It is not hard to see how this kind of thinking leads to turning government over to artificial intelligence, eating bioreactor grown bacteria instead of real food, the herding of people into cities, sterilization, promotion of transgender surgery, glorification of non-reproductive sex, elevating the preservation of nature above the feeding of humans, the breaking down of families and the end of individual rights.

It can be hard for some people to see the danger of these ideas because they do not see the difference between reasonable steps to reduce pollution and protect the soil and water and limiting the destruction of animals. These are not bad things. The problem is in removing God as sovereign creator of the universe and replacing him with something else. These people are self-destructive and deceived. They don’t see how they are tools of the prince of this world who has desired to eliminate man from the earth since God created him. They are worshipping their own wisdom and attempting to be gods themselves, just like Satan. We cannot disregard God and expect things to go well for us. Rather than creating another new theory, we should return to the wisdom of God and glorify Him.

21because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

24Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen

https://www.bible.com/bible/1/ROM.1.KJV