Though contemporary Western humanity remains absorbed in its “little pleasures for the day” and “little pleasures for the night,” I nevertheless wonder sometimes whether we are Nietzsche’s last men or the first posthumans. Perhaps we represent some kind of transitional form, if devolution has transitional forms, in which case we will probably never know. After all, the Neanderthals presumably did not comprehend who or what they were. It belongs to man—indeed it is his defining characteristic—to comprehend himself in the light of a total meaning of life that he cannot totally comprehend. This is why Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, became a question to himself. It is why man is Homo sapiens. And it is why C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, which is turning out to be one of the most important little books of the twentieth century, says that the posthuman planners and conditioners of the future (our present?) are not “bad men” but rather not men at all in the traditional sense. They “have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity,” Lewis says, “in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.” Attempting to live outside the total meaning that he called the Tao, but still subject to its iron necessities, they have rejected the ontological preconditions for sapientia and denied themselves the stores of humane experience and accumulated human wisdom bequeathed to the heirs of tradition. They cannot really apprehend truth or goodness or beauty in the way that their ancestors did. What they know is possibility—power—because this is what reality and truth consist of for them. What they cannot know is a truth well understood by their ancestors who once apprehended these things, which is that those who seek to become more than human inevitably become subhuman, bestial, and those who would make themselves the masters of power inevitably become its servants.

Yet devolution, like evolution, is not an all-at-once event. It takes time to eradicate ancestral forms; Darwin realized this as he patiently waited for the “civilized races” to “exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.” If a few Homo sapiens survive into the posthuman era, like John the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World, and if they should take an interest in the history of their demise, they will discover a moment—late, to be sure, but a moment nonetheless—when things might have turned out otherwise.

It was the summer of 2001. The papers were full of sensational stories about breakthroughs in stem cell research. Extracting totipotent embryonic stem cells was an ethical minefield; it involved, among other things, the willful destruction of frozen embryos left over from I.V.F. and the prospect of cloning for biomedical research. But Americans were nevertheless enthralled with the medical possibilities latent in these discoveries. The actor Christopher Reeve, paralyzed from an equestrian accident in 1995, had become a powerful and sympathetic advocate for the cause. Democrats, still stinging from the contested presidential election, sensed an opportunity to gain a measure of revenge by painting their pro-life adversaries as opponents not just of “a woman’s right to choose,” but of scientific progress. The pressure was enormous, with a steady stream of daily media coverage of the controversy and with large magazines running spectacular features hyping salvation by stem cell therapy and a miraculous new future where the blind receive their sight and the lame walk.

This was the setting on August 9, 2001, when President George W. Bush addressed the nation in a primetime speech to discuss the historical and human significance of these apparent breakthroughs and to announce his decision on the question of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. His choice to limit the destruction of frozen human embryos or their manufacture for research purposes by restricting federal funding to pre-existing cell lines would prove to be relatively insignificant in terms of policy. Within a decade, scientists would develop alternative methods for obtaining totipotent cells, so that by the time President Obama lifted the funding ban in 2009, it was largely ceremonial—a last chance to flog Republicans for being “anti-science.” Even so, it was a remarkable speech, which grows still more remarkable with the passage of time. Not to be overlooked is the presumption—erroneous, it turns out—that Americans could still be reasoned with. Then there was the substance. President Bush was never known for his towering intellect or his flowing eloquence, but his remarks seem downright Ciceronian, especially in comparison with how politicians speak today. He began by re-affirming the nation’s commitment to scientific and medical advance and expressing great hope in the therapeutic possibilities of the new research. But he also saw that stem cell research represented “the leading edge of a series of moral hazards” which had heretofore been the stuff of science fiction, and that we therefore stood at a moment in history that called for deep and careful reflection, a kind of collective soul-searching. “We have arrived at that brave new world that seemed so distant in 1932, when Aldous Huxley wrote about human beings created in test tubes in what he called a ‘hatchery.’ In recent weeks, we learned that scientists have created human embryos in test tubes solely to experiment on them. This is deeply troubling, and a warning sign that should prompt all of us to think through these issues very carefully.” Ultimately more significant than the decision to restrict federal funding was the decision to appoint a Council on Bioethics chaired by Leon Kass, which would “keep us apprised of new developments and give our nation a forum to continue to discuss and evaluate these important issues.”

The formation of the President’s Council was a call to consider the meaning of our newfound powers. It was an invitation, perhaps even a final opportunity, “to think what we are doing,” as Hannah Arendt had put it. The unspoken assumption animating the council’s deliberations, though not one necessarily shared by all its individual members, was that human nature is more than mere biology, human reason more than mere technique, and truth more than the mere realization of technical possibilities. The council seemed to believe that something of this “more” continued to shine through the dissecting gaze of modern biology and indeed furnished the sciences with their ontological and epistemic conditions of possibility. This “more” might be difficult to define, especially in a pragmatic, technological society and a liberal political order premised upon the permanent unknowability of abiding truths, yet the council seemed to think that it could be seen phenomenologically and apprehended inductively through a humanistic reflection on such foundational human experiences as birth and death, suffering and the quest to alleviate it, as well as universal human aspirations and the ordinary standards of human excellence they entailed. Assuming a rich understanding of our humanness and a broad understanding of our biotechnical power, the council reflected on the myriad ways the former might be endangered by the latter. In addition to Human Cloning and Human Dignity, which included a record of the council’s deliberations and enumerated its policy recommendations, most notably a permanent ban on cloning to produce children and a four-year national moratorium on cloning for biomedical research, the council produced two other significant volumes. Being Human was a collection of excerpts from world literature centered on the theme of human nature which had served as background readings for the council’s deliberations. The council’s final report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, explored the meaning of biotechnology, not merely as a series of discrete biomedical interventions but as “a conceptual and ethical outlook, informed by progressive aspirations . . . a most recent and vibrant expression of the technological spirit, a desire and disposition rationally to understand, order, predict, and (ultimately) control the events and workings of nature, all pursued for the sake of human benefit.” “Biotechnology,” the council emphasized, “is bigger than its processes and products; it is a form of human empowerment.”

Unsurprisingly, the policy compromise proved satisfying to almost no one, and the group’s deliberations were quickly dismissed as a cover for neoconservative ideology. The council was accused of putting politics ahead of science, especially as two dissenters from the report’s recommendation of a moratorium on cloning for biomedical research were replaced by the president in February 2004. The council did have its limitations both in policy and in its underlying philosophy. It united to propose an outright ban on cloning to produce children and called “for a federal review of current and projected practices of human embryo research, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, genetic modification of human embryos and gametes and related matters, with a view to recommending and shaping ethically sound policies for the entire field.” Nevertheless, it is a significant compromise that it could muster no better than a four-year moratorium on biomedical cloning. Perhaps such compromises are the inevitable result of “writing by committee.” But the council could also never reach a consensus on “the moral status of the cloned embryo” because it lacked a commonly recognized metaphysical framework for determining the ontological status of embryos. Despite the brilliance of Kass’s own synthesis of natural philosophy and modern biology, which permitted him to think in neo-Aristotelian terms without ever uttering the name of “the philosopher,” he had always shown a tendency to “go literary” at the moment of metaphysical commitment. Some of the other conservatives harbored subtle metaphysical defects—a tendency to define human nature by its “developmental trajectory” rather than the reverse, for example—that would prove a liability in later controversies. And, of course, a minority of the council’s members, viewing the embryo in the reductive terms of analytical biology, were unwilling to concede its human status in any morally or ontologically significant sense.

Nevertheless, the last humanist revisiting this history would almost certainly reach a very different conclusion than the council’s contemporaries about the significance of their work, especially when viewing it amid the detritus of the intervening years. Seeking to discover a truly human criterion of bioethical judgement and recognizing that biotechnology gives expression of an entire worldview, the council reflected on great themes: the meaning of embodiment, sexual difference, natural kinship and the relations between generations, time and aging, the meaning of childhood, the dignity of properly human activity, the medicalization of all human phenomena, just to name a few. Specific biotechnical interventions such as prenatal genetic screening, sex selection, and germline manipulation, psychotropic and performance-enhancing drugs, and age retardation therapies were weighed against the criterion of a rich and fully integrated life and the normal human life cycle. In the long view, it is Beyond Therapy more than Human Cloning and Human Dignity that stands out for its enduring significance. This comprehensive work was often profound, sometimes even beautiful, and always accessible to an intelligent but non-specialized readership. Looking back over the history of American letters and the devolution of the last couple of decades, the last humanist might justly conclude that the work of the President’s Council on Bioethics was the high-water mark of American public philosophy and certainly the pinnacle of thought for American government documents. (Though he would doubtless be impressed also by Lincoln’s Second Inaugural). If our founding documents had been imbued with such humanistic concern, we might never have come to this brave new world in the first place.

It is amazing therefore how quickly and quietly it all went away. Had history permitted the council’s manner of thinking to take root, George W. Bush might have been a great president. But it was not to be. A month after the president’s speech, Islamic terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, setting in motion the chain of events that would consume the Bush presidency and shatter biotechnology’s tenuous grip on the American attention span. When President Obama disbanded the council within months of his inauguration in 2009—he would reconstitute it as the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues under the chairmanship of Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania—it registered barely a ripple. The New York Times buried the lede when it contrasted the “somewhat philosophical bent” of Kass’s council with the new commission, which would focus on “giving more practical guidance.” In fairness, however, the significance of the change would have been difficult to perceive in real time. It is not simply that the Bush-era council offered profound reflections of enduring significance intelligible to any intelligent American still in possession of his soul, while the new commission issued jargon-laden position papers that only policy wonks or new Ivy-educated millennial “evidence-based journalists” could appreciate (though I repeat myself). Nor is it that “bioethics” went back to its conventional business of balancing “informed consent,” equitable access, public health, and—Gutmann’s hobbyhorse—effective democratic deliberation, while baptizing the inevitable. This is all true, but none of it captures the gravity of the decision.

With the benefit of hindsight, the last historian would discover that the decision to disband the council was effectively a renunciation of any serious public attempt to understand ourselves or the meaning of these awesome new powers. It marked the end of public philosophy, the replacement of a humanistic form of public rationality with a technocratic one. In retrospect, the end of the council was a watershed moment in the triumph of Homo biotechnicus and the transformation of a liberal democratic republic into a biotechnocratic order. President Obama’s commission quietly concluded its unremarkable work in 2016 to the notice of almost no one, and no subsequent bioethics commission has ever been appointed to replace it. Meanwhile, the biotechnological revolution marches on, picking up speed and bringing every facet of life within its purview. The Obergefell decision that invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage valorizes and indeed necessitates I.V.F. and commercial surrogacy for its realization, with nary a serious thought for the meaning of childhood or natural kinship, or for the social and existential implications of redefining the basic human realities of mother and father. In the name of “gender-affirming care,” we have made a generation of adolescents the subjects of a vast science experiment for which everyone and no one is responsible, violating the cardinal ethical principle that deeds for which no one can be held accountable should not be done to others. With the fusion of digital and biomedical technology, we have seen the emergence of a biomedical security state and discovered that there is nothing so outrageous that it cannot be justified in the name of “public health.” Perhaps the only thing more astonishing than the speed and scope of these developments is the compulsory thoughtlessness that has accompanied them. How could this have come about?

First of all, we cannot overestimate the lethality of the poison that Roe v. Wade and the ongoing battle over abortion injected into the American body politic. The ripple effects of this decision, spread across a couple of generations, have transformed how men and women relate to their own bodies, to each other, and to their children, helping to transform marriage, family, and self-sacrificial responsibility for others from the natural form of human maturation and fulfillment into a lifestyle choice for the economically secure. And it has transformed politics from a debate about the means to given, commonly recognized ends into the means for conducting low-grade civil war in a zero-sum game between incommensurable worldviews that cannot ultimately co-exist. This conflict is a fundamental element in a process of social disintegration that has now taken on a life of its own and from which there seems to be no recovery. But most of all, accepting such large-scale barbarism as normal has meant actively cultivating a moral numbness and intellectual blindness that must be jealously guarded and constantly renewed. Every new situation, every human question, and every bioethical dilemma must be measured against its possible impact on “reproductive freedom,” lest the suppressed questions about what we are doing and what we have done to ourselves—to say nothing of the suppressed guilt—reassert themselves.

The cynical hysterics following the Alabama Supreme Court judgement that embryos created through I.V.F. and destroyed through negligence should be regarded as persons who could be harmed and not merely as property that could be damaged is only the most recent and most obvious example. The decision raises obvious and irreducibly philosophical questions. Some of these questions are quite difficult, but not all of them are, and you need not be a professional philosopher to ask them. All that is required is that you have a soul left to search, which apparently excludes much of the medical and political establishment and the editorial staff of the Washington Post. But if the products of I.V.F. are not nascent human beings, then why is it a matter of life and death to maintain unfettered access to this technology for any combination of adults who want it? And if embryos are human beings, then what the hell are they doing frozen away in a kind of artificially induced limbo in the first place? What might be the eventual effects—medical, psychological, existential—for persons who spent the first years of their existence on ice? How could we ever know this in advance of putting them there? The questions provoked by this and other daring deeds of bioengineering are so unanswerable as to make them all but unaskable. The sexual revolution is but the human face of the biotechnical revolution. Its most recent victories, the valorization of “assisted reproductive technologies” in the aftermath of Obergefell and the social transformations that compel young women to freeze their eggs and resort to donor conception, the abolition of man and woman in the transgender revolution, make the suppression of such questions all the more urgent, thereby restricting the scope of what we are permitted to think and speak about and acting like a steroid injection for this cynicism and hysteria.

Yet there is more to all this than the cynicism and ill will that define our all-consuming politics. There is a structural discrepancy between our power and our knowledge built into the logic of modern technology. This is due partly to the provisional character of scientific truth, partly to the fact that the quest for scientific progress is an inherently social pursuit extended across generations, and partly to the fact that technology possesses its own causal agency and propagates its own effects, so that the ultimate meaning of a technological intervention launched into the stream of history cannot be anticipated or controlled. The proliferation of means precedes the articulation of ends so that technology thus becomes goal-setting rather than goal-serving, as Hans Jonas put it. It is often only after a certain technology has been developed, after we have acquired or ensnared ourselves in some new form of power, that we discover what it is for, by which point we can only partially glimpse what it means. Not only can we do things to ourselves and our posterity that we do not know how to think about; what we think about, what we think things are, is inevitably determined by what we can do. Being—reality itself—comes to be measured by our power rather than the other way around, which is tantamount to abolishing that reality.

This priority of possibility over reality is built into the liberal conception of freedom, the scientific conflation of truth and feasibility, and the biologistic and mechanistic conception of nature presupposed and perpetuated by them. This is what it meant for the council to call biotechnology a “conceptual and ethical outlook” and, we should add, an ontological outlook. Just as it was the capacity for sapientia, for comprehending himself in light of the total meaning of things that defined Homo sapiens, so it is this essentially “technological” conception of nature, knowledge, and truth that defines Homo biotechnicus. For him—or perhaps I should say, for “they”—the abstract becomes the measure of the concrete, the exception of the measure of the norm, and possibility, which is infinite by definition, the measure of actuality. Because we can analytically separate and manipulate the once undivided human act of conception into discrete moments in a process and redistribute them among various combinations of adults, we imagine that “conception” is what really happens under a microscope, and sometimes it just happens to take place in the backseat of a car or inside a woman’s body. We imagine that because we can now manufacture children for whom the once natural question—“who is my mother?”—has no natural answer, mothers and fathers are incidental to the meaning of our humanity and can be replaced by functionally equivalent roles without loss—an indispensable precondition for so-called “marriage equality.” We imagine that a man might “really” be a woman, because we imagine that we have devised surgical and biochemical means for transforming him into one. We imagine that because we have contrived a network of machines capable of computing vast numbers of ones and zeros at infinitesimal speed, intelligence, understanding, consists in the computation of ones and zeros. And so on.

Our biotechnical power and our thoughtlessness are thus proportionally and not inversely related to each other. Every expansion of the frontier of this brave new world entails a corresponding restriction of the human horizon. The more its power increases, the more we make our peace with its processes and artifacts, the more human reason is reduced to the technical and pragmatic reason responsible for their production, the less we are willing, able, or permitted to think seriously about what we are doing. Assisted reproductive technologies, same-sex marriage, and so-called gender-affirming medicine are only the most recent and obvious examples of a deep and pervasive logic that measures truth by technological power. And what begins as a voluntary limit on our willingness to think ends as an involuntary limitation of our capacity to see. It is obvious that the appeal to science is no help here but is rather like attempting to navigate a ship with its landmark tied to the bow, in Jonas’s image. “Science” is not a brake upon our descent into unreality, but its engine. In “the conceptual and ethical outlook” of biotechnology, “nature” is simply whatever happens or can be made to happen. It provides no inherent limit to technological power except the limit of possibility, which can only be discovered in the process of attempting to violate it. There is no way from within technical reason and its corresponding vision of nature even to pose the question of what things are or what they might mean; nor is there any reason to think that they might be or mean much of anything. Which is pretty much where we are now.

The triumph of Homo biotechnicus is premised upon the extinction of Homo sapiens. The two cannot ultimately live side by side. “They” cannot increase unless “he” decreases, and the signs are legion that he is already passing. The death of Homo sapiens for the sake of whatever “humanity shall henceforth mean” will mean the end of both the capacity and the desire to “think what we are doing,” leaving our children and our children’s children ever more at the mercy of what we have done.