Developed since the modern age, progress is certainly one of the founding myths of our civilization. The various industrial revolutions that humanity has experienced from the 18th century onwards and, subsequently, the objective and splendid period of economic and social growth that in the West followed the Second World War have undoubtedly provided excellent arguments for this mythology. The idea of a linear and unstoppable development of human history towards “magnificent and progressive destiny”, in which the past was to be considered predominantly (today exclusively) as a denial (of knowledge, of rights, of technical culture) and redeemable only by a continuous projection towards an increasingly bright future has, over time, become part of the common feeling of Western man.
It has done so to such an extent that not even the various crises that have followed one another incessantly since the end of the last millennium (financial, economic, health and geopolitical) and which have upset the life prospects of the majority have been able to make a dent in it. Indeed, precisely in the clash with empirical evidence that threatens to cast doubt on the exclusively positive connotations that had been attributed to it, progress has today left the role of myth to transform itself into faith. In the parody of a religion, conveyed by an all-pervasive media and cultural industry and sadly reduced to the bass drum of powerful elite circles. Thus, anyone dares to question the paths recently taken by the breed homo sapiensespecially in its relationship with technology (but not only), risks being put on the index. “If something becomes possible, it is also desirable“, seems to be the prevailing thought within the hegemonic culture. And it doesn't matter if, for example, artificial intelligence risks wiping out (as Tesla owner Elon Musk recently admitted, while seasoning the “prophecy” with implausible idyllic implications) and leaving millions without a purpose. of workers. It does not matter whether the constitutive elements of an individual's identity, such as sex (degraded to “gender”), are now considered simple constructs and, as such, repudiable and removable (surgically or even, more simply, with a stroke of pen and a self-declaration). It is always and in any case about “progress” and therefore, as such, it cannot be doubted. Anyone who did so would automatically expose themselves to the accusation of being “retrograde”, “not in step with the times” and so on of clichés carrying a stigma that is difficult to sustain.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in this context, faced with a widespread chorus (abounding, for example, among so-called “conservative” politicians) of fearful “moderate critics” who, while internally disapproving of the most extreme tendencies of certain “progressivism” , possessed by the terror of social disapproval, do not dare go beyond timid observations, there are few voices that dare to raise radical objections, rejecting not individual beliefs but the entire paradigm. Among these, in our country, the valid Gianluca Marletta can be counted. Roman, graduated in Medieval History from the University of Roma Tre and in Religious Sciences from the Pontifical Lateran University, essayist and author, among others, of a volume entitled “The Last Religion” (co-written with Paolo Gulisano in 2020 for Historica Edizioni), he recently placed his signature on a text entitled “Transhumanism. Mask and face of post-humanity”, published by Cinabro Edizioni. The book, which features a preface by Enrica Perucchietti and an introductory essay by Enzo Pennetta, investigates, precisely, what is now the ideology of a terminal world. Our world. The one in which the (albeit just) tension towards a progressive improvement of living conditions through technique and knowledge has, in relatively recent times, been transformed and reversed into the sulphurous and luciferian aspiration of overcoming and, perhaps, of a destruction of biological man and his deepest nature, even internal: transhumanism.
This vision of the world, however, in this text is not only analyzed (and finely so) in its origins and its most traumatic implications (in various fields: from radical animalism to genderfrom extremist environmentalism to movements child free, from the dogma of digitalization to the myth of artificial intelligence). Unlike what happens in other volumes on similar topics, in fact, Marletta also tries to indicate an antidote to the poison: the path to recovering a spiritual anthropology of the great traditions. Not a simple path, this is clear, but also one which, perhaps, is the only one that can be followed so that humanity does not fall, in the space of a short time, straight into a ravine.