Transhumanism's WEIRD Religion

While transhumanism is a technoscientific cultural movement, it is also a cultural movement, intimately linked to some to a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) social imaginary. As such, transhumanism is intimately tied to the morality and political economy of WEIRD societies. I also show that transhumanism also operates within a Nietzschean power ontology, and one might even say, following Heidegger, that transhumanism has an ontotheological structure. In this essay, I argue, following Bergson, it has a technoscientific mythological element, and as such, it becomes a religion, which is to say that it has a metaphysical-moral worldview. Transhumanism has its pieties, its dogmas, and an imaginary through which it takes up with reality. It has its moralities enacted by its social, political, and economic institutions. Drawing on Bergson, I argue that transhumanism is a fusion of the WEIRD static morality, with a mechanical understanding of all of being – including human moral being – and placed within the evolutionary meaning-structure, all in support of evolving the posthuman. Transhumanism is a static religion because it seeks to master human transformation into a posthuman god.