It was the pause heard round the world. In a wide-ranging conversation last year about AI, transhumanism, and the religious imagination of the tech industry, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked Peter Thiel whether he wanted the human race to endure. Here is how the next twenty seconds unfolded:
Thiel: Uh . . .
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would—I would—
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: [Pause] Yes.
Douthat: Okay.
Thiel: But . . .
Like many listening, I rewound to be sure I’d heard correctly. Had a prime player in the building of our collective future—one, furthermore, who has publicly aligned himself with the Christian faith—really hesitated at the question of whether there should be a future for us?
Contrarianism has, of course, become its own currency, not least in the tech world. But this turn to the normative—not will we survive but should we—has marked something more than a Silicon Valley parlour game. It feels important to take Thiel’s squirm seriously as a new waterline, a cultural tell from within the circles shaping the tools that now mediate so much of daily life. If affirming the value of a human future now requires a caveat, what else have those with the power to set the terms begun to doubt? And how much has that doubt already reorganized what we build and how we live?
In his illuminating book The Revolt Against Humanity, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch observes that a once-unthinkable proposal has begun to sound plausible in polite company: that humanity’s reign on earth may be nearing its end, and that rather than dreading our coming extinction, we should welcome it. Call this the anti-human: not a conscious hatred of people, but an Edenic whisper that the human condition—our limits, our dependencies, our vulnerabilities, our very mortality—can and should be treated as a defect to be dissected and corrected rather than a reality to be borne.
This orientation is no longer confined to eccentric theorists. It has filtered into environmental discourse, academic philosophy, technological futurism, and the boardrooms underwriting it all. Fantasies once confined to speculative subcultures—digital immortality, post-biological futures—now read as mainstream plausibility. Meanwhile, some of the world’s most sophisticated societies are prescribing death as a solution to the problem of pain.
What kind of moment makes the continuation of the human story feel this morally fraught?
Welcome to this issue of Comment. Across a wide range of genres and domains, our authors attend to the places where the pressure feels greatest today, and perhaps always has: at birth and death, amid war and moral injury, in the stories we tell to remember and to forget, in the technologies that mimic presence and simulate the real. In all these places, we are confronting not so much a culture that openly despises humanity as one quietly tempted to transcend it.
Still, while darker than our usual offering, this issue does not provoke tears without hope. Our authors look for the traces that refuse to disappear, for moments when the fullness of the human breaks through our cultural despair, not by escaping suffering, but by bearing it in ways that transfigure the bruise of betrayal.
We think, almost like a key fitting a lock, that the Christian humanist tradition, founded on the words spoken when a scourged and battered Christ was presented to the crowd—Ecce homo! Behold the man!—has something to say in response. What follows is an attempt to listen for that word in the places we resist it most, and to render our wounds open to the One whose wounds disclose our worth.
